We put a rover on Mars. I bet your services still need a hardcoded IP to say "hello world".
Somewhere right now, a senior engineer is grepping through YAML files to find out why Service A can't talk to Service B. The answer is in an ENV file last touched by someone who left the company in 2019.
Hardcoding service addresses? That's not configuration. That's a prayer with a port number.
Service goes offline? Host changes? Now you're debugging at 2am. The fix takes 4 minutes. The incident report takes 3 hours. Nothing changes.
When I encountered service discovery inside a Kafka cluster around 2015, it clicked. Brokers register with ZooKeeper. Clients ask who's available. No hardcoded addresses. The cluster just knows about itself. I'd been suffering through manual wiring for years. Turns out the solution existed. I just hadn't admitted the problem was optional.
The pattern is simple. A central registry where services check in. Other services query it to find what they need. Consul, etcd, Kubernetes native discovery. Pick one or roll your own (Node.js ftw).
Your infrastructure shouldn't require tribal knowledge to boot.
We solved distributed consensus. We put a helicopter on Mars. You can stop grepping for port numbers.
Whats your hardcoded IP in production right now?
Asking for a friend.
NOW MOUNT UP, GET TO IT AND BLAST THIS SONG
❤️
Jake
That Software Engineering Leader Dude.