Service Registries in a Microservices Architecture

In the SOA world, we had service registries that listed the services available in an organization. The consumer could check out the list and request for consuming the services. After an approval (usually), permission was granted to consume the service. I have seen this done at design time, most of the times.

In the Microservices architecture too, we are seeing a need for this functionality. While tools such as Netflix Eureka and Consul provide service discovery. They are more runtime focused and concerned with the availability of services.

Are there any tools to implement the service registry or should we build it from scratch? Or is it an anti-pattern in the microservices architecture? Please do let me know your thoughts.

Originally posted at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/service-registries-microservices-architecture-danesh-zaki/