This blog is part of my ongoing series on Docker containers. In my previous blogs 1 and 2, I covered basics of Docker Networking and also covered some of the limitations with the current solutions. In the next few blogs, I will cover Docker Networking solutions from Socketplane, Weaveworks, CoreOS. Socketplane is developing a Docker networking solution that links containers across multiple hosts. They released a technology preview recently of their initial implementation. In this blog, I will cover some of my thoughts related to trying out the their initial solution.
Following are some internals of the implementation as I understood:
- Openvswitch is used as the bridge where container interfaces are connected.
- Multicast DNS is used to discover other cluster members. As of now, multicast is a requirement in Underlay network.
- Consul is used as a service discovery mechanism where the key, data values for the whole cluster is stored. When socketplane agent is started, it prompts to choose the primary and secondary cluster members.
- vxlan is used as a tunneling mechanism for data encapsulation between hosts.
Following is a picture of the data path between 2 containers on 2 different hosts.
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