Introduction

Throughout this workshop, we have looked at many aspects of containerization and microservices architecture in relation to Docker. We have learned about how encapsulating applications into microservices that perform discrete functions creates an incredibly flexible architecture that enables rapid deployments and powerful horizontal scaling. Perhaps one of the more interesting and complex topics as it relates to containerization is networking. After all, in order to develop a flexible and agile microservices architecture, proper networking considerations need to be made to ensure reliable connectivity between container instances.

When referring to container networking, always try to keep in mind the difference between networking on the container host (underlay networking) and networking between containers on the same host or within different clusters (overlay networking). Docker supports many different types of network configurations out of the box that can be customized...