"an alternative is to register with a load balancer dynamically" To expand on this, a common pattern is to have a local proxy installed on each host machine.

"an alternative is to register with a load balancer dynamically" To expand on this, a common pattern is to have a local proxy installed on each host machine. To route traffic to a new container, one simply updates the config for the local nginx/haproxy/hipache/other proxy. A second layer of load balancing exposes the singular, top-level endpoint. All Docker hosts are registered with this LB, but those without live containers for a given service are simply "out of rotation" for that endpoint (health check failure). This simplifies the service discovery aspect for architectures not already using a more sophisticated mechanism.