Currently we expect something like this for the "hosts" property: "http://host1:port1 https://host2:port2".

Since the path cannot be specified, and it's highly unlikely that anyone would want to use a different protocol for each host, it would make more sense to expect something like this: "host1:port1 host2:port2" and to add a separate property to specify the protocol.

In fact, we already have a similar property, but it's only used for discovery: "discovery.scheme". We could replace it completely with a more general "scheme" or "protocol" property.