This blog is a continuation of my previous blog on Docker Experimental Networking. In this blog, I will walk through the example mentioned in this link where experimental Docker is integrated with Compose and Swarm. I have made some modifications here and I will cover this here.

I will create 2 applications in this example using Docker Compose.

1. Counter container connecting to redis container running on 2 different hosts.
2. WordPress container connecting to mysql container running on 2 different hosts.

I have used AWS instead of Digitalocean. First step is to create Consul machine and start Consul server.

docker-machine create --driver=amazonec2 --amazonec2-access-key=xxx --amazonec2-secret-key=xxx --amazonec2-vpc-id=vpc-5f77c23a --amazonec2-region=us-west-2 --engine-install-url "https://experimental.docker.com" consul

docker $(docker-machine config consul) run -d \
    -p "8500:8500" \
    -h "consul" \
    progrium/consul -server -bootstrap

Next, create 2 machines connecting both the nodes to Consul:

Continue reading Docker Experimental Networking – 3 →

Networking support in Docker was primitive till now. Single host connectivity was through Linux bridge and there was no native mechanism to connect Containers across hosts. With Pipework, we could do a hacky approach to connect Containers across hosts. Companies like Socketplane, Weave have been working to address this Networking gap. I have written multiple blogs before on Docker Networking and they can be referred here. Socketplane was recently acquired by Docker and they provide the native batteries-included Docker Networking solution and solutions like from Weave will be available as a Docker Networking plugin. With Docker experimental release, we can connect Containers across hosts using Docker native solution as well as use Networking plugins to connect Containers across hosts. In this blog, I will cover some basics of the solution and will walk-through some of the hands-on stuff that I tried with the experimental Docker release.

Docker Networking blocks:

At high level, the diagram above describes the flow for Docker Networking.

• Docker runtime was integrated previously with Networking and there was no way to separate the 2. Libnetwork is the new Networking library that provides the Networking functionality and is seperated from Core Docker. Docker 1.7 release has already included the libnetwork and is backward compatible from enduser perspective.
• Drivers implement the APIs provided by libnetwork. Docker is leaning towards plugin approach for major functionalities like Networking, Storage, Orchestration where Docker provides a native solution which can be substituted with technologies with other vendors as long as they implement the APIs provided by the common library. In this case, Bridge and Overlay are the Native Docker networking drivers and remote drivers can be implemented by third-party. There are already many remote drivers available like Weave.

Docker Container Networking model: Continue reading Docker Experimental Networking – 1 →