The Docker Ecosystem: Service Discovery and Distributed Configuration Stores

Introduction

Containers provide an elegant solution for those looking to design and deploy applications at scale. While Docker provides the actual containerizing technology, many other projects assist in developing the tools needed for appropriate bootstrapping and communication in the deployment environment.

One of the core technologies that many Docker environments rely on is service discovery. Service discovery allows an application or component to discover information about their environment and neighbors. This is usually implemented as a distributed key-value store, which can also serve as a more general location to dictate configuration details. Configuring a service discovery tool allows you to separate your runtime configuration from the actual container, which allows you to reuse the same image in a number of environments.

In this guide, we’ll discuss the benefits of service discovery within a clustered Docker environment. We will focus mainly on general concepts, but provide more specific examples where appropriate.