Container networking
Containers and microservices bring all of the following networking challenges.
- Increased east-west traffic
- Service discovery
- Tracing requests
- IP churn
- Security
East-west network traffic is jargon for containers in the same application talking to each other on the same networks. The other type of traffic flow is called north-south and is applications talking to external services. Consider a simple example of a microservices application with a web front-end service and a shopping cart service. Traffic between the front-end and the shopping cart containers is east-west traffic on the same network. The traffic between the front-end and external client, such as a customer’s mobile phone app, is north-south and over untrusted networks such as the internet.
Microservices architectures split complex applications into lots of small applications that all talk to each other over the network. This massively increases east-west traffic and requires traffic...
