Docker: Up & Running

Chapter 9. Docker at Scale

One of Docker’s major strengths is its ability to abstract away the underlying hardware and operating system so that your application is not constrained to any particular host or environment. It facilitates not just horizontally scaling a stateless application within your data center, but also across cloud providers without many of the traditional barriers to similar efforts. True to the shipping container metaphor, a container on one cloud looks like a container on another.

Many organizations will find cloud deployments of Docker very appealing because they can gain any of the immediate benefits of a scalable container-based platform without needing to completely build something in-house. But the barrier is low for creating your own clusters, and we’ll cover some options for doing that shortly.

It is easy to install Docker on almost any Linux-based cloud instance. However, Docker and almost every major public cloud provider is actively developing tooling for intelligently deploying and managing Docker containers across a cluster. At the time of this writing, many of these projects are usable, but still in the early stages.

If you have your own private cloud, you can leverage a tool like Docker Swarm to deploy containers easily across a large pool of Docker hosts, or use the community tool Centurion or Helios to quickly facilitate multi-host deployments. If you have already experimented with Docker at scale and are looking to build something more like ...