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Docker Networking Practical Examples

Photo by Antoine Petitteville on Unsplash

A lot has been written about Docker networking, but there is not a lot of practical examples out there.
So I decided to try to clarify it with a couple of Docker networking examples.

Note: this blog is referring to Docker version 19.03.13.

Quick Overview of Docker Networking

First, let us have a quick overview of Docker networking.
Docker has different networking drivers:

bridge: the default network driver,
host: for standalone containers,
overlay: used in Docker swarm,
macvlan: works on MAC addresses assigned to containers,
none: networking is disabled,
Network plugins: Third-party network plugins with Docker.

Here we will mainly focus on bridge networking driver since it allows us to connect two or more containers together and it gives us the most flexibility/functionality in terms of networking.
I will not go into the details of Docker networking. It is quite well documented in Docker documentation. Here I will just quickly summon up a couple of points.

Port Publishing
When you create or run a container, Docker by default does not publish any of its ports to the host network. To achieve that we need to publish the ports with --publish or -p flag. This will create a firewall rule which maps a container port to a port on the host network.

IP address and hostname
Each container gets an IP address in every Docker network it is attached to. The Docker daemon has its own DHCP server which is in charge of assigning the IP’s from the subnet range. Each network also has a default subnet mask and gateway.

By default, when a container starts, it can be connected to only one network with --network flag. We can also assign it either IPv4 or IPv6 address with --ip or --ip6 flags.
Later, we can attach the container to different networks with:
docker network connect [OPTIONS] NETWORK CONTAINER.

DNS services
A Docker container inherits the DNS settings of the host, from /etc/resolv.conf configuration file.
Containers that use the default bridge network get a copy of this file, whereas containers that use a custom/named network use Docker’s embedded DNS server, which forwards external DNS lookups to the DNS servers configured that custom/named docker network.

A container’s hostname is by default the container’s ID in Docker. We can override it with --hostname or use the --alias flag to specify an additional network alias for the container on that network.

There are also certain limitations on each of the operating systems which we need to be aware of:

MacOS,
Windows.

Practical Examples

Let us take as an example a most common scenario with two interacting services (CLIENT and SERVER) running locally on our computer without Docker. Here we focus on only two containers but we can easily apply the same configuration to additional services.

While these two services run on your computers network, they can communicate over a local HOST network (localhost or 127.0.0.1 ) as seen in the below image

On our localhost, user can access CLIENT on localhost:3000, and CLIENT can access SERVER API on port localhost:9000.

Now we want to Dockerize these two applications, and here, the story begins …

By default, Docker uses its own network, so we can no longer point CLIENT to SERVER on localhost:9000. Each container will have its own IP, and each container has to be configured in a way that services can still be accessible. So let us look at a couple of solutions we can use to solve this mystery.

Named Network

Docker by default uses bridge networking subsystem. When a service starts in the docker container, it will be in that network, unless specified differently.

Containerized application/service can no longer point to localhost/127.0.0.1. Docker will start containers with, for example, 172.17.0.x.
So our CLIENT in new Docker image should point to for example 172.17.0.2:9000.
Here comes the catch. The 172.17.0.2 IP address is internal to the Docker engine. This IP is dynamic, and it might change. Also, we need to update or make it configurable where our services are pointing to (for, e.g. database connections, REST API’s…) To get around that, we can do the following:

docker network create --driver=bridge next-net we have to create a new user-defined network. Bear in mind named bridge network is not the same as the default bridge network, it has automatic DNS resolution…
docker run -d --name=next-blog-api --net=next-net -p 8888:9000 next-blog-api start the SERVER with mapped port (our service is running on port 9000 inside of the container) and we give it a name, so a random name is not allocated to that container
docker run -d --net=next-net -p 3002:3000 next-blog start the client on the same network (service inside of this container should now be pointing to http://next-blog-api:9000)

Here we created a new network and linked our containers to them. We used “named bridge network” which creates a DNS record for next-blog-api. Now we are able to connect Dockerized CLIENT to Dockerized SERVER API on http://next-blog-api:9000.
And dockerized SERVER and client will also be available on the HOST from http://localhost:3002 and http://localhost:8888.

There is a couple of things we need to be aware regarding Dockerfile and docker run command:

in Dockerfile when you EXPOSE a port, that signals to a hosting service that it needs to bind to this port to access the service running inside. For example, if we do not EXPOSE port, a platform like Azure might assume that application inside is running on default web port 80, which will cause connection failure.
and when you use docker run -p ... flag, that makes it accessible outside of Docker network

Host Network (Only for Linux)

Another solution would be we to run Docker on the host network. This is not the best solution since the host network is meant mainly for standalone containers, but it is still good to be aware of it. Here again, we have a couple of gotchas:

published ports are discarded when using host network mode (we can’t specify a different port for that container. We can’t map ports as we did in bridge network with -p 9001:9000.
it works only on Linux as stated here
the container will take the namespace and port of the host
docker run -d --network=host next-blog-api
docker run -d --net=host next-blog

Links (for Docker Engines Before 1.9 Version)

In case you are running a version of Docker before 1.9, and you should manually create links between the containers (using the legacy — link flag). These links need to be created in both directions, so you can see this gets complex with more than two containers which need to communicate. Alternatively, you can manipulate the /etc/hosts files within the containers, but this creates problems that are difficult to debug.

e.g.:
docker run -d -p 3002:3000 next-blog
docker run -d -p 8888:9000 next-blog-api --link=next-blog:next-blog

We can see that there are quite a few solutions. First one being optimal, but it depends on your scenario which one will work for you. Also, in testing/production environments, we would most likely use some orchestration tool like Docker-swarm or Kubernetes, where Docker images would communicate over the overlay networks. I will not go into details of configuring the managed Docker network, but on generally there is a couple of guidelines we could follow to avoid having connection issues:

we have to make sure that correct ports are open and nothing is blocking them
enable forwarding from Docker containers to the outside world (that is on the Linux host machine)
You need the following ports open to traffic to and from each Docker host participating on an overlay network: — TCP port 2377 for cluster management communications — TCP and UDP port 7946 for communication among nodes — UDP port 4789 for overlay network traffic
…

Troubleshooting

There can be loads of different scenarios where we could have an issue connecting containers. So it is best to know how to do some general Docker networking troubleshooting.
We can troubleshoot docker network with the following commands:

docker network ls will display a list of currently defined networks

docker network inspects <network name> will give us details (IP’s, gateways, subnets) of the specific network.

docker inspect <container id> will give us details of the specific container (including networking details)

It can also be useful to create a “debug container” and run some networking commands:

echo '
FROM ubuntu:16.04
RUN apt update && apt install -y arp-scan iputils-ping iproute2
CMD ["/bin/bash"]' > Dockerfile
docker build . -t net-tool
docker run -it net-tool
ip addr show #run inside of container
arp-scan --interface=eth0 --localnet #run inside of container

If you have any better troubleshooting solutions, feel free to post it in the comments.

And that is all folks. Happy dockering!!!