Service Discovery

Kubernetes (Default)

In Kubernetes, APISIX discovers upstreams via DNS automatically. Each service gets a ClusterIP DNS name:

# APISIX upstream config
upstream:
  type: roundrobin
  nodes:
    ai-gateway.gatez.svc.cluster.local:4000: 1

APISIX resolves ai-gateway.gatez.svc.cluster.local via CoreDNS. No additional configuration needed.

Headless Services (Pod-level routing)

For direct pod routing (bypassing ClusterIP load balancing):

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: ai-gateway-headless
  namespace: gatez
spec:
  clusterIP: None
  selector:
    app: ai-gateway
  ports:
    - port: 4000

APISIX resolves headless services to individual pod IPs, enabling pod-level health checks.

Consul Integration

APISIX supports Consul for service discovery via the consul discovery module:

# apisix.yaml
discovery:
  consul:
    servers:
      - "http://consul:8500"
    prefix: "/v1/health/service"
    weight: 1
    fetch_interval: 3
    default_service:
      host: "127.0.0.1"
      port: 80

Register services in Consul:

curl -X PUT http://consul:8500/v1/agent/service/register -d '{
  "ID": "ai-gateway-1",
  "Name": "ai-gateway",
  "Port": 4000,
  "Check": {"HTTP": "http://localhost:4000/health", "Interval": "10s"}
}'

DNS SRV Records

APISIX supports DNS SRV record-based discovery:

# apisix.yaml
discovery:
  dns:
    servers:
      - "127.0.0.1:53"

# APISIX route with DNS discovery
upstream:
  discovery_type: dns
  service_name: _ai-gateway._tcp.gatez.svc.cluster.local

Docker Compose (Development)

In Docker Compose, services discover each other via container names on the gateway-net network:

upstream:
  nodes:
    ai-gateway:4000: 1        # Container name resolution
    agent-gateway:5000: 1
    mock-backend:80: 1

No additional discovery configuration needed for development.