What is the conceptual difference between Service Discovery tools and Load Balancers that check node health?

Question

Recently several service discovery tools have become popular/\"mainstream\", and I’m wondering under what primary use cases one should employ them instead of traditional load ba

Answer 1

If you look at the tools from a completely different perspective, namely ITSM/ITIL, load balancing becomes "just that", whereas service discovery is a part of keeping your CMDB up to date, and ajour with all your services, and their interconnectivity, for better visibility of impact, in case of downtime, and an overview of areas that may need supplementing, in case of High availability applications.

Furthermore, service-discovery only gives you a picture as of the last scan, and not near-real-time (of course dependent on which scanning interval you have set), whereas load balancing will keep an up-to-date picture of your application's health.