Building Microservices with Go

Overlay network

The Docker overlay network is a unique Docker network that is used to connect containers running on separate hosts to one another. With the bridge network as we have already learned, network communication is localized to the Docker host and this is generally fine when you are developing software. When you run your code in production however, all this changes, as you will typically be running multiple hosts, each running multiple containers as part of your high availability setup. The containers still need to talk to one another, and while we could route all traffic through an ESB (enterprise service bus), this is a little bit of an anti-pattern in the microservice world. The recommended approach as we will see in a later chapter, ...