This code is intended to be deployed as a sidecar container in a Pod alongside the semi-official CouchDB Docker image when running CouchDB as a Kubernetes StatefulSet. It will resolve the DNS records maintained by Kubernetes to discover the other peers in the cluster, then automatically populate the Pod's _nodes DB with the names of the other nodes. The end result is that the cluster is automically joined up.
If the deployment is scaled up after the initial creation those new Pods will be automatically added. Scaling down does not automatically remove the Pods from the membership database at this time.