Disclaimer: I do not work for Docker nor for any company whose business is tied to Docker in any way

Recently there has been a lot of discussions about the future of Docker networking in various communication channels. It is due to hugely increased Docker usage over the past year. Users are now realising Docker’s networking limitations which are becoming more apparent. The truth is, and I’m sure we can all agree on this, the current networking capabilities of Docker are not sufficient for more complicated setups. Current model is plagued with performance issues and not flexible enough. But for a basic usage it does a pretty good job. However, we never just stay within “basic usage” realm. With the cloud and current world of microservices this is almost impossible. So the time has come to move forward. As one of many contributors to libcontainer, I feel like I need to express my opinion about where I stand in all these discussions and this blog post is about that.

2014-07-30 22:35 Update: I’ve updated the post with the link to netlink RFC. I’ve also replaced references to golang with Go programming language on majority of mentions in the article. I do agree with the people in discussions on the topic of Go/golang, but I’ve adpoted golang in my vocabulary as that’s my standard search term on Google for the information about Go language, hence the abundance of the word golang in the original post.

Daily Dilemma

Recently I’ve been finding myself in various conversations about Docker and Linux Containers (LXC). Most of the time the conversations eventually end up with one and the same question and that is whether we should run containers in production. Initially this post had a few paragraphs where I philosophised about readiness of the technology, but I’ve deleted those paragraphs now as the attention dedicated to containers in past year has been nothing short of amazing and more and more companies are running their Infrastructures in the containers or at least big parts of them. I’m sure this trend will continue to high degree in the future, so I’ve now removed these paragraphs and kept the technical content only.