This project provides an implementation of Discovery Client for Kubernetes. This client lets you query Kubernetes endpoints (see services) by name. A service is typically exposed by the Kubernetes API server as a collection of endpoints that represent http and https addresses and that a client can access from a Spring Boot application running as a pod. This discovery feature is also used by the Spring Cloud Kubernetes Ribbon project to fetch the list of the endpoints defined for an application to be load balanced.

This is something that you get for free by adding the following dependency inside your project:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-kubernetes</artifactId>
</dependency>

To enable loading of the DiscoveryClient, add @EnableDiscoveryClient to the according configuration or application class, as the following example shows:

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableDiscoveryClient
public class Application {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
  }
}

Then you can inject the client in your code simply by autowiring it, as the following example shows:

@Autowired
private DiscoveryClient discoveryClient;

If, for any reason, you need to disable the DiscoveryClient, you can set the following property in application.properties:

spring.cloud.kubernetes.discovery.enabled=false

Some Spring Cloud components use the DiscoveryClient in order to obtain information about the local service instance. For this to work, you need to align the Kubernetes service name with the spring.application.name property.

Spring Cloud Kubernetes can also watch the Kubernetes service catalog for changes and update the DiscoveryClient implementation accordingly. In order to enable this functionality you need to add @EnableScheduling on a configuration class in your application.