After following this guide to build a Consul-based service registry, a whole new world has opened up for us: communication between services has stabilized, and most importantly, adding new services or scaling existing services requires very little additional work.

We built a mechanism to automatically exclude problematic service instances with healthchecks, so partial failures are much less likely to propagate to the entire system. Previously, if one service went down, the whole team would work overtime to fix it, but now the system takes care of the workarounds, which is much less stressful for developers.

After six months, we've seen a more than 90% reduction in inter-service communication failures, and we've cut our time to deploy new features in half.

If you're running a microservices architecture, you should definitely consider adopting a service registry. There's an initial deployment cost, but it will save you a lot of operational costs and stress in the long run!