Connecting between containerized services

Overview

When services need to connect to each other in a containerized environment, you can't rely on IP addresses since containers are both ephemeral and abstracted from the underlying servers. Instead you can use the service name and (where needed) the application namespace. When used together these are known the service’s Elastic DNS address.

Finding service names and namespaces

You can find the names of all your services, as well as your application’s namespace on your Cloud 66 Dashboard.

• Service names are listed under Application → Services
• To see the full Elastic DNS address, click the service name and then Show More and then look at the Address row.
• The application namespace (which is different from your application name) can also be found under ⚙️ Settings:
  • Click Show More at the bottom of the Application & Servers panel
  • Click the More Information link in the Application Type row

Connecting to a service in the same application

Let's imagine your application has two services - web and api. In our application, web needs to connect to api internally for data.

Our api runs Rails, and listens on port 3000. So we configure the api service to have container port 3000 exposed. This is now exposed internally only - no one can access api from outside of your application. The defintion of the api service in service.yml will look like this:

services: 
  api: 
    ports:
    - container: 3000 

If we want to connect directly to the api service from within the web service we can now simply use http://api:3000 as the address. We will configure your application so that "api" is automatically translated to the location where your api service is listening.

Now, if we re-configure api so that it runs over port 80 instead, we can connect to it using http://api

We can do similar things if these services use TCP or UDP:

• tcp://api:8000
• udp://api

Connecting to services in different applications

If two Cloud 66 applications in the same cluster need to communicate with each other they use the same syntax as above, but add .namespace to reference the other application.

So, if our second application uses the web-front-end namespace, and the application in our example above uses the backoffice-workers namespace, you could connect between them as follows:

• http://web-worker.web-front-end:8080 would connect to the web-worker service on port 8080.
• tcp://scheduler.backoffice-workers:8000 would connect to the backoffice scheduler over port 8000
• http://processor.backoffice-workers would connect to the processor over standard HTTP

Connecting to databases

You can connect to databases from containers using the same syntax. For example your default MySQL server can be addressed as http://mysql:3306.

If your application has multi databases, they can be addressed using the database type appended by the name of the server. For example: mysql-default and mysql-leopard.