Docker Cookbook

Chapter 8. Docker in the Cloud

8.0 Introduction

With the advent of public and private clouds, enterprises have moved an increasing number of workloads to the clouds. A significant portion of IT infrastructure is now provisioned on public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Engine (GCE), and Microsoft Azure (Azure). In addition, companies have deployed private clouds to provide a self-service infrastructure for IT needs.

Although Docker, like any software, runs on bare-metal servers, running a Docker host in a public or private cloud (i.e., on virtual machines) and orchestrating containers started on those hosts is going to be a critical part of new IT infrastructure needs. Figure 8-1 depicts a simple setup where you are accessing a remote Docker host in the cloud using your local Docker client.

Figure 8-1. Docker in the cloud

This chapter covers the top three public clouds (i.e., AWS, GCE, and Azure) and some of the Docker services they offer. If you have never used a public cloud, now is the time and Recipe 8.1 will cover some basics to get you started. Then you will see how to use the CLI of these clouds to start instances and install Docker in Recipe 8.2, Recipe 8.3, and Recipe 8.4. To avoid installing the CLI we show you a trick in Recipe 8.7, where all the cloud clients can actually run in a container.

While Docker Machine (see Recipe 1.9) will ultimately ...