Nacos is an open-source platform for dynamic service discovery, configuration management, and service metadata in cloud-native and microservice environments. It provides infrastructure that lets services register themselves, discover other services, and receive configuration changes without requiring application redeployment.

Its core capabilities include service discovery with health checking, centralized dynamic configuration, weighted routing and DNS-oriented service discovery, and dashboards for managing service metadata, health, configuration, and metrics. Nacos supports many service styles and ecosystems, including Spring Cloud, Dubbo, gRPC, Kubernetes, and REST-based applications, making it usable across heterogeneous microservice architectures.

Nacos is aimed at backend and platform teams that need a shared control layer for service naming and runtime configuration. It can be deployed as a standalone server for development or as a production cluster, and it is particularly useful in systems where many independently deployed services need reliable discovery, centralized configuration, health awareness, and operational visibility.