Cloud native service discovery is fundamentally about how services and microservices find and connect to each other reliably in a dynamic environment, so A is correct. In cloud native systems (especially Kubernetes), instances are ephemeral: Pods can be created, destroyed, rescheduled, and scaled at any time. Hardcoding IPs breaks quickly. Service discovery provides stable names and lookup mechanisms so that one component can locate another even as underlying endpoints change.
In Kubernetes, service discovery is commonly achieved through Services (stable virtual IP + DNS name) and cluster DNS (CoreDNS). A Service selects a group of Pods via labels, and Kubernetes maintains the set of endpoints behind that Service. Clients connect to the Service name (DNS) and Kubernetes routes traffic to the current healthy Pods. For some workloads, headless Services provide DNS records that map directly to Pod IPs for per-instance discovery.
The other options describe different networking concepts: B is ARP (MAC discovery), C is DHCP (IP assignment), and D is DNS in a general internet sense. DNS is often used as a mechanism for service discovery, but cloud native service discovery is broader: it’s the overall mechanism enabling dynamic location of services, often implemented via DNS and/or environment variables and sometimes enhanced by service meshes.
So the best description remains A: a mechanism that allows applications and microservices to locate each other on a network in a dynamic environment.
