I'm not sure I understand this. You have a product that is split into many different components, and when you deploy this product to a customer site, each component runs on different hosts, so you have a bunch of wiring up of service addresses to do for every deployment?

Could something like mDNS be a lightweight solution to that problem?

And also I am genuinely curious how kubernetes would solve that. When you install kubernetes on all of these machines, don't you have to manually do the configuration for that either? So isn't it just choosing to rather configure kubernetes instead of your own application for each deployment? If it is that much simpler to setup a kubernetes cluster than your app, maybe the solution is to put some effort into the configuration management part of your product?