A system and methods for service discovery and publication are disclosed. Application programs write requests for service discovery, publication, and subscription to a service discovery application programming interface. The service discovery application programming interface invokes one or more lower-level protocols to satisfy the discovery, publication and/or subscription request. Service information retrieved from lower-layer protocols is formatted into a consistent data model and returned to the client application. In addition, service information may be stored in a persistent data store managed by a discovery persistence service communicatively connected to the service discovery API.