I have multiple Spring Boot microservices that need to communicate with each other through REST APIs. I’m deploying these services on a Kubernetes cluster but I’m having trouble figuring out how to properly configure service discovery and endpoint resolution.
My setup looks like this:
Service A needs to call Service B
Service B consumes data from Service C
Service D makes requests to both Service A and Service B
I’m not sure how to properly configure the endpoint URLs so that these services can find and communicate with each other within the Kubernetes cluster. What’s the best approach for handling inter-service communication in this type of distributed setup? Any guidance would be really helpful.
For production, set up proper network policies alongside DNS-based communication. Service names work great, but add a service mesh like Istio if you need advanced traffic management or security. One gotcha that tripped me up: make sure your targetPort in the Service definition matches what Spring Boot actually listens on, not just what you want to expose. If you’re hitting timeout issues between services, bump up the connection timeouts in application.properties. Network calls within the cluster can get slow under heavy load.
Use Kubernetes DNS for service discovery. Deploy each microservice and create a Service resource that exposes the pods. Kubernetes automatically creates DNS entries like <service-name>.<namespace>.svc.cluster.local. In your Spring Boot apps, just configure service URLs in application.properties using the service names directly. If Service A needs to call Service B, set service-b.url=http://service-b:8080 where service-b is your Service name and 8080 is the target port. Make sure your Service resources have the right selectors to match your pod labels and verify the ports are exposed correctly. You won’t need external service discovery tools since Kubernetes handles DNS resolution automatically. I’ve used this pattern for two years and it’s been rock solid for internal cluster communication.
k8s services r great, but dont forget the health checks! make sure to set up actuator endpoints in your spring boot apps & use readiness/liveness probes in your deployment ymls. if you need fast pod-to-pod comms, headless services might be the way to go.