Introduction to Weave

We learned before that applications running inside Docker have no knowledge of the IP address of the host machine. Hence, they are not in position to register their IP for the service, since another container running outside the host has to use the host IP address for accessing the service.

If an IP address of the host machine is passed as an environment variable, service information can be stored in etcd and read by the service user as illustrated in Chapter 5, Discovering Services Running in Cluster. This approach requires the application code to be aware of how services can be discovered.

Weave simplifies service discovery and does a lot more. Weave provides a mechanism to connect applications running inside a Docker container irrespective of where they are deployed. Since application services are running as a Docker container, the ease of communication of micro-services running in Docker containers is very important.

Weave registers the named containers automatically...