I've managed to run Docker Swam mode with multiple hosts with Docker Toolbox, but I am unable to create a swarm with Docker Desktop since it apparently only offers single node swarm.
Is there any way to get this working with Docker Desktop or is it not supported?
No. But yes. But actually no. But technically yes.
No. Docker Desktop does not support this. It manages a single docker node in a vm and has no capability to manage multiple dockers.
But yes. docker:dind is an image you can easily use to deploy multiple docker nodes as containers, and then swarm init / swarm join to create a swarm cluster hosted on docker. You can even swarm join the docker-desktop node to be the swarm manager which means you can communicate with your local docker desktop node to control the swarm.
But actually, no.
Unless your use case is a very limited hello-world on swarm tutorial, there is no support for exposing ports from the dind-swarm to the host. Even if the host docker acts as the manager, overlay networking that is required for ingress will require communications over :2377, :4789/udp, and :7946, and as the host is not part of its own overlay networks, this will never work.
So, communicating with tasks running on the swarm is basically impossible.
But technically yes. play-with-docker apparently runs docker swarms using dind. They do some heavy lifting to expose a restricted set of ports via l7 loadbalancers. Pretty cool. but not at all easy to do at home. If you have a spare Dell PowerEdge or equivalent blade server with 120+ cores just laying around, and want to expose it as a docker swarm rather than split it into VMS... perhaps this is a viable approach.
Why is it that Docker prohibits attaching a container to both the host and user defined bridge network?
Secondly, for deployments that require disabling IP forwarding on the host machine does docker recommend deploying docker containers with host networking only, since based on what i understand that seems to be the only option left.
Any insights on the above two?
Thanks
Why is it that Docker prohibits attaching a container to both the host and user defined bridge network?
Because there's no way to "attach" networks when a container is running in the host network namespace.
Docker attaches networks by adding virtual interfaces to a container's isolated network namespace. When running in the global network namespace, there's no sane way to do this: any new interfaces wouldn't be restricted to the container, and would potentially disrupt host networking.
Secondly, for deployments that require disabling IP forwarding on the host machine does docker recommend deploying docker containers with host networking only, since based on what i understand that seems to be the only option left.
That's probably the only easy option.
You could run a proxy service on the host that would expose services in Docker containers. You could potentially even automate that by monitoring the Docker for events and getting information about published ports. Otherwise you would need to manually implement the appropriate configuration.
I'm wondering whether there are any differences between the following docker setups.
Administrating two separate docker engines via the remote api.
Administrating two docker swarm nodes via one single docker engine.
I'm wondering if you can administrate a swarm with the ability run a container on a specific node are there any use cases to have separate docker engines?
The difference between the two is swarm mode. When a docker engine is running services in swarm mode you get:
Orchestration from the manager to continuously try to correct any differences between the current state and the target state. This can also include HA using the quorum model (as long as a majority of the managers are reachable to make decisions).
Overlay networking which allows containers on different hosts to talk to each other on their own container network. That can also involve IPSEC for security.
Mesh networking for published ports and a VIP for the service that doesn't change like container IP's do. The latter prevents problems from DNS caching. And the former has all nodes in the swarm publish the port and routes traffic to a container providing this service.
Rolling upgrades to avoid any downtime with replicated services.
Load balancing across multiple nodes when scaling up a service.
More details on swarm mode are available from docker's documentation.
The downside of swarm mode is that you are one layer removed from the containers when they run on a remote node. You can't run an exec command on a task to investigate a container, you need to do that on a container and be on the node it's currently using. Docker also removed some options from services like --volumes-from which don't apply when containers may be running on different machines.
If you think you may grow beyond running containers on a single node, need to communicate between the containers on different nodes, or simply want the orchestration features like rolling upgrades, then I would recommend swarm mode. I'd only manage containers directly on the hosts if you have a specific requirement that prevents swarm mode from being an option. And you can always do both, manage some containers directly and others as a service or stack inside of swarm, on the same nodes.
From the docker linking
I can have A container links to B container.
Then I can see the B's ip address and exposed port in A's ENV variables.
However, how can I figure out A's ip address wihtin B container?
To find one container from another, you can use a 'service discovery' mechanism such as SkyDock.
Skydock - Automagic Service Discovery for Docker
Skydock monitors docker events when containers start, stop, die, kill, etc and inserts records into a dynamic DNS server skydns. This allows standard DNS queries for services running inside docker containers.
For the more complex case where your containers are on multiple hosts and you need a way to network them together, see weave-dns (Please note I work on weave and weave-dns).
Docker allows servers from multiple containers to connect to each other via links and service discovery. However, from what I can see this service discovery is host-local. I would like to implement a service that uses other services hosted on a different machine.
There have been several approaches to solving this problem in Docker, such as CoreOS's jumpers, host-local services that essentially proxy to the other machine, and a whole bunch of github projects for managing Docker deployments that appear to have attempted to support this use-case.
Given the pace of development it is hard to follow what current best practices are. Therefore my question is essentially:
What (if any) is the current predominant method for linking across hosts in Docker, and
Are there any plans for supporting this functionality directly in the Docker system?
Update
Docker has recently announced a new tool called Swarm for Docker orchestration.
Swarm allows you do "join" multiple docker daemons: You first create a swarm, start a swarm manager on one machine, and have docker daemons "join" the swarm manager using the swarm's identifier. The docker client connects to the swarm manager as if it were a regular docker server.
When a container started with Swarm, it is automatically assigned to a free node that meets any constraints that have been defined. The following example is taken from the blog post:
$ docker run -d -P -e constraint:storage=ssd mysql
One of the supported constraints is "node" that allows you pin a container to a specific hostname. The swarm also resolves links across nodes.
In my testing I got the impression that Swarm doesn't yet work with volumes at a fixed location very well (or at least the process of linking them is not very intuitive), so this is something to keep in mind.
Swarm is now in beta phase.
Until recently, the Ambassador Pattern was the only Docker-native approach to remote-host service discovery. This pattern can still be used and doesn't require any magic beyond plain Docker in that the pattern consists of one or more additional containers that act as proxies.
Additionally, there are several third-party extensions to make Docker cluster-capable. Third-party solutions include:
Connecting the Docker network bridges on two hosts, lightweight and various solutions exist, but generally with some caveats
DNS-based discovery e.g. with skydock and SkyDNS
Docker management tools such as Shipyard, and Docker orchestration tools. See this question for an extensive list: How to scale Docker containers in production
UPDATE 3
Libswarm has been renamed as swarm and is now a separate application.
Here is the github page demo to use as a starting point:
# create a cluster
$ swarm create
6856663cdefdec325839a4b7e1de38e8
# on each of your nodes, start the swarm agent
# <node_ip> doesn't have to be public (eg. 192.168.0.X),
# as long as the other nodes can reach it, it is fine.
$ swarm join --token=6856663cdefdec325839a4b7e1de38e8 --addr=<node_ip:2375>
# start the manager on any machine or your laptop
$ swarm manage --token=6856663cdefdec325839a4b7e1de38e8 --addr=<swarm_ip:swarm_port>
# use the regular docker cli
$ docker -H <swarm_ip:swarm_port> info
$ docker -H <swarm_ip:swarm_port> run ...
$ docker -H <swarm_ip:swarm_port> ps
$ docker -H <swarm_ip:swarm_port> logs ...
...
# list nodes in your cluster
$ swarm list --token=6856663cdefdec325839a4b7e1de38e8
http://<node_ip:2375>
UPDATE 2
The official approach is now to use libswarm see a demo here
UPDATE
There is a nice gist for openvswitch hosts communication in docker using the same approach.
To allow service discovery there is an interesting approach based on DNS called skydock.
There is also a screencast.
This is also a nice article using the same pieces of the puzzle but adding also vlans on top:
http://fbevmware.blogspot.it/2013/12/coupling-docker-and-open-vswitch.html
The patching has nothing to do with the robustness of the solution. Docker is actually only a sort of DSL upon Linux Containers and both solutions in these articles simply bypass some Docker automatic settings and fall back directly to Linux Containers.
So you can use the solutions safely and wait to be able to do it in a simpler way once Docker will implement it.
Weave is a new Docker virtual network technology that acts as a virtual ethernet switch over TCP/UDP - all you need is a Docker container running Weave on your host.
What's interesting here is
Instead of links, use static IPs/hostnames in your virtual network
Hosts don't need full connectivity, a mesh is formed based on what peers are available, and packets will be routed multi-hop to where they need to go
This leads to interesting scenarios like
Create a virtual network across the WAN, none of the Docker containers will know or care what actual network they sit in
Move your containers to different physical docker hosts, Weave will detect the peer accordingly
For example, there's an example guide on how to create a multi-node Cassandra cluster across your laptop and a few cloud (EC2) hosts with two commands per host. I launched a CoreOS cluster with AWS CloudFormation, installed weave on each in /home/core, plus my laptop vagrant docker VM, and got a cluster up in under an hour. My laptop is firewalled but Weave seemed to be okay with that, it just connects out to its EC2 peers.
Update
Docker 1.12 contains the so called swarm mode and also adds a service abstraction. They probably aren't mature enough for every use case, but I suggest you to keep them under observation. The swarm mode at least helps in a multi-host setup, which doesn't necessarily make linking easier. The Docker-internal DNS server (since 1.11) should help you to access container names, if they are well-known - meaning that the generated names in a Swarm context won't be so easy to address.
With the Docker 1.9 release you'll get built in multi host networking. They also provide an example script to easily provision a working cluster.
You'll need a K/V store (e.g. Consul) which allows to share state across the different Docker engines on every host. Every Docker engine need to be configured with that K/V store and you can then use Swarm to connect your hosts.
Then you create a new overlay network like this:
$ docker network create --driver overlay my-network
Containers can now be run with the network name as run parameter:
$ docker run -itd --net=my-network busybox
They can also be connected to a network when already running:
$ docker network connect my-network my-container
More details are available in the documentation.
The following article describes nicely how to connect docker containers on multiple hosts: http://goldmann.pl/blog/2014/01/21/connecting-docker-containers-on-multiple-hosts/
It is possible to bridge several Docker subnets together using Open vSwitch or Tinc. I have prepared Gists to show how to do it:
Open vSwitch: https://gist.github.com/noteed/8656989
Tinc: https://gist.github.com/noteed/11031504
The advantage I see using this solution instead of the --link option and the ambassador pattern is that I find it more transparent: there is no need to have additional containers and more importantly, no need to expose ports on the host. Actually I think of the --link option to be a temporary hack before Docker get a nicer story about multi-host (or multi-daemon) setups.
Note: I know there is another answer pointing to my first Gist but I don't have enough karma to edit or comment on that answer.
As mentioned above, Weave is definitely a viable solution to link Docker containers across the hosts. Based on my own experience with it, it is fairly straightfoward to set it up. It is now also has DNS service which you can address container's by its DNS names.
On the other hand, there is CoreOS's Flannel and Juniper's Opencontrail for wiring the containers across the hosts.
Seems like docker swarm 1.14 allows you to:
assing hostname to container, using --hostname tag, but i haven't been able to make it work, containers are not able to ping each other by assigned hostnames.
assigning services to machine using --constraint 'node.hostname == <host>'