NRF as service registry — discovery and binding

NRF as the 5GC Service Registry

The Network Repository Function (NRF) is 5GC's service registry — the equivalent of Consul, etcd, or Eureka in modern microservice architectures. Every NF registers with the NRF on startup, publishing its profile: NF type (AMF, SMF, AUSF), supported services, FQDN or IP, capacity hints, served PLMNs, and supported network slices. Other NFs query the NRF when they need to call a producer service. The discovery API returns a list of matching NF instances; the consumer NF picks one and establishes an HTTP/2 connection. The pattern is exactly the service-discovery pattern any backend engineer has…