Linking containers

Before the introduction of the concept of the user-defined network, container linking was predominantly used for inter-container discovery and communication. That is, cooperating containers can be linked together to offer complex and business-aware services. The linked containers have a kind of source-recipient relationship, wherein the source container gets linked to the recipient container, and the recipient securely receives a variety of information from the source container. However, the source container will know nothing about the recipients to which it is linked. Another noteworthy feature of linking containers in a secured setup is that the linked containers can communicate using secure tunnels without exposing the ports used for the setup to the external world. Though you will find lots of deployments that use container-linking techniques, they are cumbersome and time-consuming to configure...