The more common service discovery pattern is a centralized server-side discovery pattern where the DNS system is used to direct the clients to the container. In this particular way of finding services, a container registers and de-registers itself from the service registry, which holds the state of the system. This state, in turn, is used to populate the DNS entries that the client then contacts to find the target(s) that it is trying to connect to. While this system is generally pretty stable and flexible, it sometimes suffers from really tricky issues that generally hamper DNS systems elsewhere, such as DNS caching, which uses stale IP addresses until the time-to-live (TTL) expires or when the app itself caches the DNS entry regardless of updates (NGINX and Java apps are notorious for this).