I understand that if I use the host network driver for a container, that container’s network stack is not isolated from the Docker host.
I also believe understand conceptually that a good reasons to still do it might be when "Security is not an Issue or concern" and network throughput performance is important but I am struggling to think of a real world example of when I can or should do this. A naive example I can think of is a public facing load-balancer or static file web server.
I realize it may be possible to mitigate the security concerns outside of using host services like AWS or Google Cloud if hosted there but what if that wasn't an option!
When would or should an you use it in a production environment?
How can you mitigate the security concerns regardless of hosting environment?
How should you interact with other services in other docker networks?
I am struggling to think of a real world example of when I can or should do this. ... When would or should an you use it in a production environment?
Your application does not run on TCP or UDP, but another protocol
Your application requires a large range of incoming ports to be published (by default a docker-proxy process is spawned per published port, this can be excessive for a large range)
Your application works with multi-cast or broadcast network traffic
Your application needs to modify the networking layer of the host itself, e.g. a VPN
How can you mitigate the security concerns regardless of hosting environment?
You need to trust this application. You've removed a layer of docker namespacing and at that point, the container is a packaging format and likely fits in with the rest of your tooling, but doesn't require the same security approach you may have for other containers.
How should you interact with other services in other docker networks?
You would interact via published ports of the other containers, same as you would an application running outside of a container that needs to connect to an application inside of a container.
but I am struggling to think of a real world example of when I can or should do this.
Here is real world example: We use host network to speed up build stage of our gitlab ci/cd pipeline.
Container in question is up and running only during build phase, doesn't have any port exposed, needs faster network to download all the necessary pieces to build and push docker image and we experienced (in some intermittent occasions) issues with throughput and inconsistent behavior during build stage that we resolved with host network. Although with host network we "expose" ip of such a container, we still don't expose any ports and after build phase is finished container is discarded.
I know this doesn't answers all of your questions, but is requested real world example.
Related
I have a unique Docker issue. I am developing an application which needs to connect to multiple Docker containers. The gist is, that this application will use the Docker SDK to spin up containers and connect to them as needed.
However, due to the nature of the application, we should assume that each one of these containers is compromised and unsafe. Therefore, I need to separate them from the host network (so they cannot access my devices and the WAN). I still have the constraint of needing to connect to them from my application.
It is a well-known problem that the macOS networking stack doesn't support connecting to a docker network. Normally, I'd get around this by exposing a port I need. However, this is not possible with my application, as I am using internal networks with Docker.
I'd like to accomplish something like the following. Imagine Container 2 and Container 3 are on their own private internal network. The host (which isn't a container) is controlling the Docker SDK and can query their internal IPs. Thus, it can easily connect to these machines without this network being exposed to the network of the host. Fortunately, this sort of setup works on Linux. However, I'd like to come up with a cross platform solution that works on macOS.
I had a similar situation. What I ended up doing was:
The app manages a dynamic container-to-port mapping (just a hash table).
When my app (on the host) wants to launch a container, it finds an unused port in a pre-defined range (e.g. 28000-29000).
Once it has a port, it maps the container's port to some port in a pre-determined range (e.g. -p 28003:80).
When my app needs to refer to a container, it uses localhost:<port> (e.g. localhost:28001).
It turns out to not be a lot of code, but if you go that route, make sure you encapsulate the way you refer to containers (i.e. don't hard-code the hostname and port, use a class that generates the string).
All that said, you should really do some testing with a VM deployment option before you rule it out as too slow.
I currently have six docker containers that were triggered by a docker-compose file. Now I wish to move some of them to a remote machine and enable remote communication between them.
The problem now is that I also need to add a layer of security by encrypting their traffic.
This should be for a production website and needs to be very stable so I am unsure about which protocols/approaches could be better for this scenario.
I have used port forwarding using ssh and know that could also apply some stability through autossh. But I am unsure if there are other approaches that could help achieve the same idea by also taking into account stability and performance.
What protocols/approaches could help on this aim? How do they differ?
I would not recommend manually configuring docker container connections across physical servers because docker already contains a solution for that called Docker Swarm. Follow this documentation to configure your containers to use a docker swarm. I've done it and it's very cool!
I am migrating legacy application deployed on two physical servers[web-app(node1) and DB(node2)].
Though following blog fullfilled my requirement. but still some questions
https://codeblog.dotsandbrackets.com/multi-host-docker-network-without-swarm/#comment-2833
1- For mentioned scenario web-app(node1) and DB(node2), we can use expose port options and webapp will use that port, why to create overlay network?
2- By using swarm-mode with replica=1 we can achieve same, so what advantage we will get by using creating overlay network without swarm mode?
3- if node on which consul is installed, it goes down our whole application is no more working.(correct if understanding is wrong)
4- In swarm-mode if manager node goes down(which also have webapp) my understanding is swarm will launch both containers on available host? please correct me if my understanding is not correct?
That article is describing an outdated mode of operation for 'Swarm'. What's described is 'Classic Swarm' that needed an external kv store (like consul) but now Docker primarily uses 'Swarm mode' (which is an orchestration capability built in to the engine itself). To answer what I think your questions are:
I think you're asking, if we can expose a port for a service on a host, why do we need an overlay network? If so, what happens if the host goes down and the container gets re-scheduled to another node? The overlay network takes care of that by keeping track of where containers are and routing traffic appropriately.
Not sure what you mean by this.
If consul was a key piece of discovery infra then yes, it would be a single point of failure so you'd want to run it HA. This is one of the reasons that the dependency on an external kv was removed with 'Swarm Mode'.
Not sure what you mean by this, but maybe about rebalancing? If so then yes, if a host (with containers) goes down, those containers will be re-scheduled on another node.
In our company ~7 projects, each based on Docker. Each project contain base services, like MySQL, Nginx, PHP. Some of projects communicate with other projects. Because of many services on same port, we make new docker host (docker-machine) for each project. From here few problems are coming:
VirtualBox assign random IP to each Docker host, depends on sequence of executing.
Hard to switch from project to project, need to set different shell envs all the time. Easy to make mistake.
Well, I'm searching for more enterprise solution to manage many docker machines. Or a some technique that can help me with current situation.
I had similar problems last summer.
First, I started to deploy my projects to swarm-cluster as services, instead of clustering several docker VMs. This enabled me to play around services with only the service IDs. It is important that how to separate projects into services, this part may be cumbersome depending on your project.
https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/swarm-tutorial/deploy-service/
Then, I build my configuration and monitoring software once on swarm-manager and use it. You can use your automation tools on docker-manager to control services.
A virtual machine consumes resources and it is better to avoid it if is not necessarily. Instead you could deploy the projects in the docker swarm on bare metals.
But because every project has an entry point that needs to be accesible from the outside world (i.e. https://site1.com and https://site2.com) you can't expose the same port (443 or 80) for all the frontend services in the same swarm. For this you can use a reverse proxy like HAProxy or Nginx that forwards the requests to the right service based on the hostname. The reverse proxy could be also a service in the swarm. In this situation you should not expose the projects' ports anymore.
A reverse proxy has many other advantages, like SSL termination (this makes the SSL certificate management a lot easier).
If you add the projects to the same custom network then the services from different projects could communicate securely and directly, using their docker service name and the internal port (i.e. 80).
We are working with a dockerized kafka environment. I would like to know the best practices for deployments of kafka-connectors and kafka-streams applications in such scenerio . Currently we are deploying each connector and stream as springboot applications and are started as systemctl microservices . I do not find a significant advantage in dockerizing each kafka connector and stream . Please provide me insights on the same
To me the Docker vs non-Docker thing comes down to "what does your operations team or organization support?"
Dockerized applications have an advantage in that they all look / act the same: you docker run a Java app the same way as you docker run a Ruby app. Where as with an approach of running programs with systemd, there's not usually a common abstraction layer around "how do I run this thing?"
Dockerized applications may also abstract some small operational details, like port management for example - ie making sure all your app's management.ports don't clash with each other. An application in a Docker container will run as one port inside the container, and you can expose that port as some other number outside. (either random, or one to your choosing).
Depending on the infrastructure support, a normal Docker scheduler may auto-scale a service when that service reaches some capacity. However, in Kafka streams applications the concurrency is limited by the number of partitions in the Kafka topics, so scaling up will just mean some consumers in your consumer groups go idle (if there's more than the number of partitions).
But it also adds complications: if you use RocksDB as your local store, you'll likely want to persist that outside the (disposable, and maybe read only!) container. So you'll need to figure out how to do volume persistence, operationally / organizationally. With plain ol' Jars with Systemd... well you always have the hard drive, and if the server crashes either it will restart (physical machine) or hopefully it will be restored by some instance block storage thing.
By this I mean to say: that kstream apps are not stateless, web apps where auto-scaling will always give you some more power, and that serves HTTP traffic. The people making these decisions at an organization or operations level may not fully know this. Then again, hey if everyone writes Docker stuff then the organization / operations team "just" have some Docker scheduler clusters (like a Kubernetes cluster, or Amazon ECS cluster) to manage, and don't have to manage VMs as directly anymore.
Dockerizing + clustering with kubernetes provide many benefits like auto healing, auto horizontal scaling.
Auto healing: in case spring application crashes, kubernetes will automatically run another instances and will ensure required number of containers are always up.
Auto horizontal scaling: if you get burst of messages, yo can tune spring applications to auto scale up or down using HPA that can use custom metrics also.