How to run docker containers on different machines

Question

I've setup several docker containers for my application:

1. container for mysql
2. container for application server (tomcat7)
3. container for nginx
4. container for python tornado application

On my local machine, using docker-machine, I've tried all these containers and them interactive with each other. I created one virtualbox machine with boot2linux and setup all these containers on it.

Now, for production I am going to run each one of these containers on a separate server. Is there something docker provides to quickly/easily do this? Or should I set up docker on each server, copy relevant images to that server, and then start docker-images manually on all servers?

Answer 1

Or should I set up docker on each server, copy relevant images to that server, and then start docker-images manually on all servers?

Yes, but you should also:

• create the relevant libnetworks in order for your containers to be registered in them
• create as first container a KV one (Key-Value: Consul, etcd, Zookeeper, ...) that will monitor each containers in each network(/machine), allowing them to see each others.
  Note: you might want to use a docker 1.10 for adding a network-scoped alias to your containers.

Then you can create your containers on your machines.

See a practical example at Understand Docker container networks