Many STH readers use docker on a daily basis. Docker just had a new release version 1.10 which has some big updates to Docker Engine and Swarm as well as some updates to Machine and Registry. The headline update for this release is again improved networking. Networking in Docker has been a sore spot for years now so it is good to see that Docker is focusing development efforts here, especially after the previous release. There are quite a few changes so here is the excerpt:
Networking gets even better
We added a new networking system in the previous version of Docker Engine. It allowed you to create virtual networks and attach containers to them so you could create the network topology that was best for your application. In addition to the support in Compose, we’ve added some other top requested features:
-
Use links in networks: Links work in the default bridge network as they have always done, but you couldn’t use them in networks that you created yourself. We’ve now added support for this so you can define the relationships between your containers and alias a hostname to a different name inside a specific container (e.g.
--link db:production_postgres
) -
Network-wide container aliases: Links let you alias a hostname for a specific container, but you can now also make a container accessible by multiple hostnames across an entire network.
-
Internal networks: Pass the
--internal
flag tonetwork create
to restrict traffic in and out of the network. -
Custom IP addresses: You can now give a container a custom IP address when running it or adding it to a network.
-
DNS server for name resolution: Hostname lookups are done with a DNS server rather than
/etc/hosts
, making it much more reliable and scalable. -
Multi-host networking on all supported Engine kernel versions: The multi-host overlay driver now works on older kernel versions (3.10 and greater).
You can head over to the Docker blog to see the full set of new features.