Service Registry

Istio maintains an internal service registry containing the set of services, and their corresponding service endpoints, running in a service mesh. Istio uses the service registry to generate Envoy configuration.

Istio does not provide service discovery, although most services are automatically added to the registry by Pilot adapters that reflect the discovered services of the underlying platform (Kubernetes, Consul, plain DNS). Additional services can also be registered manually using a ServiceEntry configuration.