Docker Cookbook

Chapter 10. Application Use Cases

10.0 Introduction

To finish this book, I will argue that Docker makes building distributed applications painless. You now have all the tools in your arsenal to build a microservices application that will scale within and outside of your datacenter. At the very least, deploying existing distributed systems/frameworks is made easier because you need to only launch a few containers. Docker Hub is full of MongoDB, Elastic, and Cassandra images, and more. Assuming that you like what is inside those images, you can grab them and run one or multiple containers, and you are done.

This last chapter presents a few use-cases that are meant as teasers and put you on your way to building your own application. First in Recipe 10.1, Pini Reznik shows you how to build a continuous integration pipeline with Docker and Jenkins. He then shows you how to extend it and build a continuous deployment pipeline using Mesos in Recipe 10.2.

In Recipe 10.3, we present an advanced recipe that show you how to build a dynamic load-balancing setup. It leverages registrator with a consul key-value store and confd. confd is a system to manage configuration templates. It watches keys in your key-value store and upon modification of the values of those keys automatically re-writes a configuration file based on a template. Using this setup you can, for example, automatically reconfigure a load-balancer when new backends are added. This is key to building an elastic load-balancer. ...