Using Docker for Microservices

Docker is the hottest platform around the world for software-powered organizations now. Docker is making a lot of buzz because of its incredible features that set apart from any other software tool that exists currently.

Developers and sysadmins around the world now know how headache-free Docker is. Its usage will significantly reduce a lot of mundane tasks and speed up the software development process. With the introduction of containerization and microservices, Docker usage has grown exponentially. Watch this trend for the keyword "Docker" below:

Docker is an open platform for developing, shipping, and running applications. You can develop applications very fast and deploy them fast. Using Docker, it is easy to create required services separately and manage them as microservices without affecting other services.

This is one biggest advancements in the software industry where we used to have big, monolithic code. Now, the biggest piece can be divided into separate services and managed easily using Docker.

So, want to know how it all starts? Take a look below. Let's say that we have some microservices that are independent.

• Create image.

  • The initial step is to get the base Docker image that is needed for the given microservice.

  • Using Dockerfile, we create an image for the service. We can use dockerfile for

    • Installing required apps and libraries.

    • Adding service to the image.

    • Adding required configuration files to the image.

    • Adding an entry point that is used to start the service. (Needed parameters and supporting factors are set here.)

• Now, all you have to do is run a few Docker commands and Docker will do the magic.

• Deployment and running microservices.

  • Let's say we have pushed our new image to the Docker hub and we provide necessary access to the system where we want to run the service. Without access to our repository, the host won't be able to pull an image.

  • Docker-machine is a tool that installs docker-engine on hosts and manages the host with docker-machine commands.

  • We can create a host on drivers like VirtualBox. In this case, it'll be AWS or Digital Ocean.

  • We can deploy our microservices in a single host or have one microservice per host.

    • How we want to deploy our microservices depends on the structure of the product.

  • Network management can be done using Nginx. Separate containers can be created for network management.

This is a brief explanation of how to deploy microservices using Docker. This is the reason why many software-powered organizations are moving from monolithic code bases to microservices architectures.