Chapter 11: Scaling and Load Testing Docker Applications

Technology giants such as Google, Facebook, Lyft, and Amazon use container orchestration systems in part so that they can run their massive computing resources at very high levels of utilization. To do that, you must have a way to scale your applications across a fleet of servers, which might be dynamically allocated from a cloud provider. Even if you have a cluster that can scale out with high traffic and scale back in when demand subsides, you may still need additional tools to make sure it operates correctly. You also need to ensure that the service degrades gracefully if capacity limits are exceeded.

You can use a service mesh such as Envoy, Istio, or Linkerd to handle those concerns. Envoy is one of the simpler options in the service mesh arena; it provides both load balancing and advanced traffic routing and filtering capabilities. All these capabilities provide the glue needed to serve traffic to demanding users. Some...