Service discovery is one of Consul's foundational capabilities. Consul is platform agnostic, which allows it to discover services across multiple runtimes and cloud providers including VMs, bare-metal, Kubernetes, Nomad, EKS, AKS, ECS, and Lambda.
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# Consul Compared to Other DNS Tools
**Examples**: NS1, AWS Route53, AzureDNS, Cloudflare DNS
Consul was originally designed as a centralized service registry for any cloud environment that dynamically tracks services as they are added, changed, or removed within a compute infrastructure. Consul maintains a catalog of these registered services and their attributes, such as IP addresses or service name. For more information, refer to [What is Service Discovery?](/consul/docs/concepts/service-discovery).
As a result, Consul can also provide basic DNS functionality, including [lookups, alternate domains, and access controls](/consul/docs/services/discovery/dns-overview). Since Consul is platform agnostic, you can retrieve service information across both cloud and on-premises data centers. Consul does not natively support some advanced DNS capabilities, such as filters or advanced routing logic. However, you can integrate Consul with existing DNS solutions, such as [NS1](https://help.ns1.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039417093-NS1-Consul-Integration-Overview) and [DNSimple](https://blog.dnsimple.com/2022/05/consul-integration/), to support these advanced capabilities.
