> I completely agree it is in part a service discovery problem - my original point is that HATEOAS is not a workable service discovery mechanism in a microservi

> I completely agree it is in part a service discovery problem - my original point is that HATEOAS is not a workable service discovery mechanism in a microservices environment. What leads you to believe that? You want a related resource, and you get it by checking it's location. It's service discovery moved to the resource level. What's hard about it? > Instead, use some service discovery technology. Not hypermedia. I don't understand what's your point. Where do you see any relevant difference? HATEOAS is already service discovery at the resource level. > It's too hard for one service to generate links (yes, let's call them complex links instead of deep links for enhanced correctness) into another. Not really. Tedious? Yes. Too hard? Absolutely not. Not only there are even modules and packages that either do that for you or do most of the work but also it's not different than just putting together a response to a request. > If it can do that then they were never really independent microservices in the first place, they are so tightly coupled. You seem very confused about this subject as you're not only mixing up unrelated concepts but also imagining problems where there are none. From the start, REST is just an architectural style, and HATEOAS is just an element of said style. HATEOAS basically boils down to a technique to allow clients to not have hardcoded references to URLs pointing to resources. Instead, when you get a response to a request, the response also returns where you can find related resources. That's it. It matters nothing if said links never change at all during the life of a service. What it matters is that if you're developing a service that's consumed by third-parties that support HATEOAS, you do not have any problem whatsoever peeling out responsibilities to other services or even redeploying them anywhere else, because your clients will simply know where to look without requiring any code change at all.