Simulating Service Discovery with Docker and Etcd

I like consul over etcd, as it implements health checks for your services, and provides DNS services.<p>In combination with consul-template you can pretty easily create automated service discovery which will update a configuration, such as HAProxy or nginx LB config, and reload the service.

I&#x27;m using the Deis publisher from the Deis project to accomplish service discovery.<p>It&#x27;s a neat go daemon that runs as a global unit(every node) listening to the docker event bus and updating etcd for you. From there it&#x27;s easy to use confd to manage updating nginx or haproxy (which is what the deis router does).

You can use skydns[1] to implement service discovery based on DNS. It has etcd as a backend and creating&#x2F;updating a DNS entry is done by creating an entry in etcd with a TTL. Then, you can use DNS the same way you are already doing without service discovery.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/skynetservices/skydns" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;skynetservices&#x2F;skydns</a>

Kubernetes seems like it is the future way to do this. It auto spins up, wires and load balances docker containers implementing named services within a cluster of vms.<p><a href="https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes/blob/master/docs/services.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;GoogleCloudPlatform&#x2F;kubernetes&#x2F;blob&#x2F;maste...</a>

Given how much effort you have to go through with etcd and discovery, why not use an MQ like RabbitMQ, that will take care of replication, etc as well?