Control over the docker images while scaling up and scaling down - docker

Lets say we have a microservice which runs in docker container.
Now to bring up this service, it uses cache which is mounted on the host volume which gets shared by all
the other docker images for same microservice. And to build this cache in app it takes 10 mins and then application gets ready to serve the request.
But this scenario gets failed when we will scale up and scale down,
Lets say I am scaling up container will be available but its still not fully up because we need to wait
to build the cache.
How you suggest to handle this scenario.
And at the font of this docker services we are planning to bring Nginx to load balance the request.
Thanks in Advance

If I understand you right, you want to know when your container is fully up and running. One option could be the Health Check. This feature was added in Docker 1.12.
Description (from Docker Docs):
The health check will first run interval seconds after the container is started, and then again interval seconds after each previous check completes.
If a single run of the check takes longer than timeout seconds then the check is considered to have failed.
It takes retries consecutive failures of the health check for the container to be considered unhealthy.
There you can specify to run any command to check your server status.
The Health of your container can be checked by using the inspect-command
docker inspect --format='{{json .State.Health}}' <container-id>
This feature adds also the "(healthy)"-information to the status in docker ps.

Related

docker container lifecycle confusion

I am new to Docker, and I find the definitions of containers' lifecycle differ a lot.
here is what "Manning.Docker.in.Action.2016.3" shows:
here is what google gives me:
https://medium.com/#nagarwal/lifecycle-of-docker-container-d2da9f85959
here is what the official document says:
status: One of created, restarting, running, removing, paused, exited, or dead
https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/ps/
So what's going on here? I guess some new states(and renaming) are introduced in newer version of Docker?
Thanks in advance
Your linked diagram separates docker create from docker start, it includes "die" as a state transition, and it shows how to get to the "restarting" state. That's all valid, though it leads to a more complicated state machine.
(docker create wasn't in the very first versions of Docker but it appeared in Docker 1.3.0 in 2014, which should predate your diagram.)
Practically I might suggest an even simpler state machine:
-------> running -+------> stopped ------>
run | stop rm
\------> exited ------>
process exits rm
That is, never try to restart a container or make changes inside a running container; if you need to tweak anything, delete the existing container and create a new one. This gives you a consistent environment (when the main container process starts you always know what's in its filesystem, up to mounted data). It also matches what happens in cluster environments like Kubernetes, where the cluster manager will routinely create and delete containers for you.
When you get in a situation where internet gives you different answers, you should consider trying it yourself. Especially with technologies like docker, where it is pretty simple to make tests. For example:
I want to run a container (I will use nginx):
docker run -d nginx
docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
258cd2edbed8 nginx "nginx -g 'daemon of…" 3 seconds ago Up 2 seconds 80/tcp jolly_golick
Note: docker will keep a container running only if there is a process running in it.
If you would start a debian container (for example), you would see how it immediately stop, as there is nothing running in it. So you could do
docker run -d debian sleep 10
and see that the container is up for 10 seconds.
When a container is running, you can do some things on it. You can't do other things, like removing it. To remove a container, you need to stop it first (or kill it), or force container removal.
Note: You would get all this info from docker itself, if you would be playing around with it, as it would return these info. Like if you would try to remove a running container, you would get this error:
Error response from daemon: You cannot remove a running container 258cd2edbed85bed23ab543312968bd893c1fbd9ba81de40366337f434daedff. Stop the container before attempting removal or force remove
I can't do all possible combinations here. You would get a similar error if you would try removing a paused container. Just play with it, and you will get a clear picture of how it works.

How to Run container from docker compose after 1 hour

I have 10 container in docker compose.
I want 9 containers to start working when i up the docker compose and allow docker-compose to run the 10th container after 1 hour of time.
Currently its running all containers at once.
How i can achieve this ?
Docker Compose doesn’t directly have this functionality. (Kubernetes doesn’t either, though it does have the ability to run a short-lived container at a specified time of day.)
Probably the best workaround to the problem as you’ve stated it is to use a tool like at(1) to run an additional container at a later time
at +1h docker run ...
My experience has generally been that it can get a little messy to depend on starting and stopping Docker containers for workflow management. You may be better off starting a pool of workers against some job queue system like RabbitMQ and injecting a job after an hour, or using a language-native scheduled-task library in your application, and just always start every container every time.

docker swarm services stuck in preparing

I have a swarm stack deployed and I removed couple services from the stack and tried to deploy them again. these services are showing with desired state remove and current state preparing .. also their name got changed from the custom service name to a random docker name. swarm also trying to start these services which are also stuck in preparing. I ran docker system prune on all nodes and them removed the stack. all the services in the stack are not existent anymore except for the random ones. now I cant delete them and they still in preparing state. the services are not running anywhere in the swarm but I want to know if there is a way to remove them.
I had the same problem. Later I found that the current state, 'Preparing' indicates that docker is trying to pull images from docker hub. But there is no clear indicator in docker service logs <serviceName> available in the docker-compose-version above '3.1'.
But it sometimes imposes the latency due to n\w bandwidth or other docker internal reasons.
Hope it helps! I will update the answer if I find more relevant information.
P.S. I identified that docker stack deploy -c <your-compose-file> <appGroupName> is not stuck when switching the command to docker-compose up. For me, it took 20+ minutes to download my image for some reasons.
So, it proves that there is no open issues with docker stack deploy,
Adding reference from Christian to club and complete this answer.
Use docker-machine ssh to connect to a particular machine:
docker-machine ssh <nameOfNode/Machine>
Your prompt will change. You are now inside another machine. Inside this other machine do this:
tail -f /var/log/docker.log
You'll see the "daemon" log for that machine. There you'll see if that particular daemon is doing the "pull" or what's is doing as part of the service preparation. In my case, I found something like this:
time="2016-09-05T19:04:07.881790998Z" level=debug msg="pull progress map[progress:[===========================================> ] 112.4 MB/130.2 MB status:Downloading
Which made me realise that it was just downloading some images from my docker account.

Docker Process Management

I have a deployed application running inside a Docker container, which is, in effect, an websocket client that runs forever. Every deploy I'm rebuilding the container and starting it with docker run using the command set in the Dockerfile.
Now, I've noticed a few times that the process occasionally dies without restarting. When running docker ps, I can see that the container is up, and has been up for 2 weeks, however the process running inside of it has died without the host being any the wiser
Do I need to go so far as to have a process manager inside of the docker container to manage the containerized process?
EDIT:
Dockerfile: https://github.com/DVG/catpen-edi/blob/master/Dockerfile
We've developed a process-manager tailor-made for Docker containers and have been using it with quite a bit of success to solve exactly the problem you describe. The best starting point is to take a look at chaperone-docker on github. The readme on the first page contains a quick link to a minimal base image as well as a fully configured LAMP stack so you can try it out and see what a fully-configured image would look like. It's open-source and fully documented.
This is a very interesting problem here related to PID1 and the fact that docker replaces PID1 with the command specified in CMD or ENTRYPOINT. What's happening is that the child process isn't automagically adopted by anything if the parent dies and it becomes an orphan (since there is no PID1 in the sense of a traditional init system like you're used to). Here is some excellent reading to give you a few ideas. You may get some mileage out of their baseimage-docker image which comes with their simplified init system ("my_app"), which will solve some of this problem for you. However, I would strongly caution you against automatically adopting the Phusion mindset for all of your containers, as there exists some ideological friction in that space. I can't recall any discussion on Docker's Github about a potential minimal init system to solve this problem, but I can't imagine it will be a problem forever. Good luck!
If you have two ruby processes it sounds like the child hasn't exited, the application has just stopped working. It's likely the EventMachine reactor is sitting in the background.
Does the EDI app really need to spawn the additional Ruby process? This only adds another layer between Docker and your app. Run the server directly with CMD [ "ruby", "boot.rb" ]. If you find the problem still occurs with a single process then you will need to find what is causing your app to hang.
When a process is running as PID 1 is docker it will need handle the SIGINT and SIGTERM signals too.
# Trap ^C
Signal.trap("INT") {
shut_down
exit
}
# Trap `Kill `
Signal.trap("TERM") {
shut_down
exit
}
Docker also has restart policies for when the container does actually die.
docker run --restart=always
no
Do not automatically restart the container when it exits. This is
the default.
on-failure[:max-retries]
Restart only if the container
exits with a non-zero exit status. Optionally, limit the number of
restart retries the Docker daemon attempts.
always
Always restart the
container regardless of the exit status. When you specify always, the
Docker daemon will try to restart the container indefinitely. The
container will also always start on daemon startup, regardless of the
current state of the container.
unless-stopped
Always restart the
container regardless of the exit status, but do not start it on daemon
startup if the container has been put to a stopped state before.

What happens when the docker host restarts?

What happens when the docker host is shut down and restarted?
will the images that were running be restarted?
will the changes that were made to those images persist, or will a new instance of the image be spawned and changes be lost?
does docker have any configuration option, such as the list of images to be automatically executed at startup and the options to run the images? Where? If not, I suppose only the docker command line can be used to alter docker state. Where is that state stored (I suppose somewhere in /var). This could be useful to backup the docker state.
(I'd have liked to find this in the FAQ)
will the images that were running be restarted?
Docker will restart containers when the daemon restarts if you pass -r=True to the startup options. On Ubuntu, you can accomplish this permanently by modifying DOCKER_OPTS="-r=true" in /etc/default/docker.
will the changes that were made to those images persist, or will a new instance of the image be spawned and changes be lost?
Containers will be stopped. Any modifications to the container will still be present when the container next starts, which will happen automatically when the docker daemon starts if -r=true is provided as mentioned above.
where is the docker configuration stored on the host system?
There is no configuration file per se. You can tune the upstart/init options in /etc/default/docker.

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