Traefik is an _Edge Router_, it means that it's the door to your platform, and that it intercepts and routes every incoming request: it knows all the logic and every rule that determine which services handle which requests (based on the [path](../../routing/routers/#rule), the [host](../../routing/routers/#rule), [headers](../../routing/routers/#rule), [and so on](../../routing/routers/#rule) ...).
## Auto Service Discovery
Where traditionally edge routers (or reverse proxies) need a configuration file that contains every possible route to your services, Traefik gets them from the services themselves.
Deploying your services, you attach information that tell Traefik the characteristics of the requests the services can handle.
In the example above, we used the request [path](../routing/routers/index.md#rule) to determine which service was in charge, but of course you can use many other different [rules](../routing/routers/index.md#rule).
!!! question "How does Traefik discover the services?"
Traefik is able to use your cluster API to discover the services and read the attached information. In Traefik, these connectors are called [providers](../providers/overview.md) because they _provide_ the configuration to Traefik. To learn more about them, read the [provider overview](../providers/overview.md) section.
