Can I run docker containers on different machines

Question

I've setup several docker containers for my application:

1. container for mysql
2. container for application server (tomcat7)
3. container for nginx
4. container for python tornado application

On my local machine, using docker-machine, I've tried all these containers and them interactive with each other. I created one virtualbox machine with boot2linux and setup all these containers on it.

Now, for production I am going to run each one of these containers on a separate server. Is there something docker provides to quickly/easily do this? Or should I set up docker on each server, copy relevant images to that server, and then start docker-images manually on all servers?

Answer 1

Yes, but you should also:

• create the relevant libnetworks in order for your containers to be registered in them
• create as first container a KV one (Key-Value: Consul, etcd, Zookeeper, ...) that will monitor each containers in each network(/machine), allowing them to see each others.
  Note: you might want to use a docker 1.10 for adding a network-scoped alias to your containers.

Answer 2

Docker defines a format for bundling an application and all its dependencies into a single object called a container. This container can be transferred to any Docker-enabled machine. The container can be executed there with the guarantee that the execution environment exposed to the application is the same in development, testing, and production. LXC implements process sandboxing, which is an important pre-requisite for portable deployment, but is not sufficient for portable deployment. If you sent me a copy of your application installed in a custom LXC configuration, it would almost certainly not run on my machine the way it does on yours. The app you sent me is tied to your machine’s specific configuration: networking, storage, logging, etc. Docker defines an abstraction for these machine-specific settings. The exact same Docker container can run - unchanged - on many different machines, with many different configurations.