Since Docker 1.6.0 there is a concept called ‘labels’, which is pretty much exactly what I need for service discovery. As I have mentioned before, I’m (ab)using ENV-vars for this. That works fine, but that has the (probably undesired) side effect that the container itself has access to these variables.

Explore other configuration sources.

We’ve focused only on the docker daemon now, but other configuration sources might make sense too, like listening for services in a Kubernetes cluster

Service Discovery is an old problem, but one that has gotten much more attention recently because of the popularity of microservices.

Consul is a distributed data store, it is similar to tools like etcd or zookeeper, but unlike those stores it is specifically targeted at service discovery.

OSGi is (among other things) a Java dynamic service discovery tool.