There are better tools for the job now. This is basically a misuse of a service instead of using things that are purpose built.
I mean, your inventory is either a grep or a zone transfer this way, for one.
I mean, your inventory is either a grep or a zone transfer this way, for one.
Storing key-value pairs in TXT records is easily parseable in any language if you use a simple delimiter. This isn't even an abuse of DNS, the protocol has been used to serve arbitrary data forever.
All the other modern services like consul, etcd, zk, etc require keeping a quorum of servers happy and have pretty heavy clients. By contrast, it's so hard to take down DNS and spinning up a new server is as easy as copying a zone file to a new server and the new server could even be running a totally different dns implementation because zone files are so standardized. Plus, your tooling can directly parse zone files with whatever dns library you were using and have a trivial way to dump the data without any server at all.
DNS can be replicated in arbitrary configurations and everything supports DNS caching for really high HA.
When you do want dynamic discovery and don't want to implement direct zone file generation, there's always CoreDNS which has plugins for so many datasources.
And if you don't want to host it, there are tons of DNS providers with great uptime.
At this point, I really can't think of any solution for service discovery that's better than DNS for most cases. Especially since the majority of service discovery solutions end up returning hostnames instead of IP addresses so you're already taking a dependency on DNS. Other solutions only really add benefit if you need to store tons of metadata or take advantage of things like leader election, etc