Clocker Adds Network Support Using Weave
Andrew Kennedy from CloudSoft has been using Weave to improve networking in Clocker, their Docker cloud. Clocker is software for laying out a set of Docker containers in your infrastructure, and thereby wiring up...
Andrew Kennedy from CloudSoft has been using Weave to improve networking in Clocker, their Docker cloud.
Clocker is software for laying out a set of Docker containers in your infrastructure, and thereby wiring up your applications. Like Weave, Clocker supports single data center and multi cloud use cases. So, making networking work really well and easily is a must. We are really pleased that the CloudSoft team selected Weave for this purpose.
As their CEO, Duncan Johnston Watt, put it to me via email “Weave provides us with the SDN capability we were looking for.”
Let’s take a look at Andrew’s blog post:
Probably the most interesting new feature […] is the addition of software defined networking or SDN capabilities. We are using the Weave open source project from the guys at Zettio which is explicitly designed to work with Docker. Clocker keeps track of each container deployed and attaches them to the Weave network, controlling the allocation of IP addresses and configuring the deployed entities so that they can use this information.
Thanks Andrew! This is a really neat use case because it shows how the ‘wiring up’ or ‘orchestration’ of applications can be simplified by using a Weave software network, that can be part of the application itself. (As opposed to a separately provisioned network backbone like, say, Nicira)
Explaining this in more detail, Andrew goes on to say the following in his post:
Since Weave is acting as a software-based network switch, connecting all Docker hosts via TCP and UDP userspace networking, the benefits of SDN are available even in cloud VMs where minimal control over networking is available. Weave allows the services on containers in different hosts to communicate seamlessly, even if there are intermediate proxying entities like the Erlang portmapper daemon, which is difficult to port-forward through Docker normally.
Please do take a look at what they have done, and let them – and us – know what we can all do to make Weave and Clocker work even better.
— alexis
UPDATE (Oct 14, 2014) — Andrew’s slides about all this, from CloudOpen Dusseldorf.
