In a recent blog post, Google introduced a new managed service on its Cloud Platform (GCP) called Service Directory. With this service, Google allows customers to publish, discover, and connect services consistently and reliably, regardless of the environment and platform where they reside.
Service Directory, currently available as beta, is a designed by Google for looking up services. For its users, the service provides real-time information about all their services in a single place, allowing them to perform service inventory management at scale, regardless of the number of endpoints.
Google Cloud software engineer Matt DeLoria and product manager Karthik Balakrishnan, Service Directory, stated in the announcement blog post:
Service Directory reduces the complexity of management and operations by providing unified visibility for all your services across cloud and on-premises environments. And because Service Directory is fully managed, you get enhanced service inventory management at scale with no operational overhead, increasing the productivity of your DevOps teams.
Source: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/introducing-service-directory
With Service Directory users can define services with metadata allowing to group service together, while quickly making the endpoints understood by their consumers and applications. Furthermore, users can use the service to register different types of services and resolve them securely over HTTP and gRPC. And finally, for DNS clients they can leverage Service Directory's private DNS zones, a feature that automatically updates DNS records as services change.
A respondent on a Hacker News thread mentions:
This seems more aimed at providing a "private catalog" (really a secure name resolver (gRPC) + load-balancing reverse-proxy) for your well-known services (database, message queue, job queue, email in, email out, push notification, SMS, video transcoding, etc.).
Source: https://cloud.google.com/service-directory/docs/overview
Amazon offers a similar cloud resource discovery service called CloudMap, available since late 2018. With CloudMap, developers can discover and monitor the health of databases, queues, microservices, and other cloud resources with custom names.
Lastly, users can use the service at no cost during the beta period. More details about Service Directory are available on the documentation page.