Third-party plugins

The first page about plugins on the Docker documentation site lists a lot of third-party plugins. As already mentioned, let's get an idea of what's going on in the background of the plugins that we have already installed and used in Chapter 3, Volume Plugins, and Chapter 4, Network Plugins.

Convoy

Convoy was the first third-party plugin we looked at in Chapter 3, Volume Plugins. To install it, we launched a Docker host in DigitalOcean as we needed a more complete underlying operating system than is provided by the Boot2Docker operating system, which is favored by Docker Machine.

To install Convoy, we downloaded a release file from GitHub. This tar archive contained the static binaries required to run Convoy on a Linux system, once the static binaries were in place, we created a Docker plugin folder and then added a symbolic link to the socket file that Convoy creates when it is first executed.

We then went on to configure a loopback device that we created on a volume. We...