Google has announced Service Directory, a managed service on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This will allow customers to discover, connect, and publish services reliably and consistently, irrespective of the platform and environment where they reside.
Currently available as beta, the Google Cloud Service Directory is designed by Google for lookup services. The service provides users with real-time information about all their services in a unified place. This, in turn, allows users to perform service inventory management at scale, irrespective of the number of endpoints.
In the announcement blog post, Google Cloud software engineer Matt DeLoria and product manager Karthik Balakrishnan, Service Directory, stated Service Directory reduces the complexity of management and operations by providing unified visibility for all your services across cloud and on-premises environments. They added you get enhanced service inventory management at scale with no operational overhead, increasing the productivity of the DevOps teams, because the Service Directory is fully managed.
Source: Google Cloud
Users can effortlessly define services with metadata with the Service Directory allowing to group services together to make the endpoints understood by their consumers and applications. In addition to this, users can now use the service for registering a wide range of services and securely resolve them over gRPC and HTTP. If this is not all, DNS clients can leverage the private DNS zones of the Service Directory. This is a feature that automatically updates DNS records as services change.
It was mentioned by a Hacker News thread that this seems more aimed at providing a “private catalog” (really a secure name resolver (gRPC) + load-balancing reverse-proxy) for your well-known services (database, message queue, job queue, email in, email out, push notification, SMS, video transcoding, etc.).
Source: Google Cloud
Users can use the service at no cost during the beta period. More details about Service Directory are available on the documentation page.
A similar cloud resource discovery service called CloudMap, offered by Amazon has been available since late 2018. Using CloudMap, developers can discover and monitor the health of microservices, queues, databases, and other cloud resources with custom names.
