Book: System Design Pocket Guide: Fundamentals My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub — an IDE for developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools Me: xgabriel.com | GitHub A pattern you see often: a platform team spends six weeks moving from a homegrown Consul setup to "just use Kubernetes services." Two weeks after the cutover, on-call gets paged because a batch job in a separate VPC can no longer find the billing API. The cluster DNS only resolves inside the cluster, and the legacy worker fleet on EC2 had been quietly relying on Consul to render its config. That story is the entire shape of service discovery in 2026. Three tools dominate. None is universally right. Each has a specific shape of pain. This post is the cheat sheet for that exact shape of migration: Consul, etcd, and Kubernetes-native DNS, scored on the questions that actually decide which one you ship. What service discovery has to do Strip the marketing and four jobs are left. Register.…