A brief overview of container networking

Like any computing node, the Docker containers need to be networked, in order to be found and accessible by other containers and clients. In a network, generally, any node is being identified through its IP address. Besides, the IP address is a unique mechanism for any client to reach out to the services offered by any server node. Docker internally uses Linux capabilities to provide network connectivity to containers. In this section, we are going to learn about the container's IP address assignment and the procedure to retrieve the container's IP address.

The Docker engine seamlessly selects and assigns an IP address to a container with no intervention from the user, when it gets launched. Well, you might be puzzled on how Docker selects an IP address for a container, and this puzzle is answered in two parts, which is as follows:

1. During the installation, Docker creates a virtual interface with the name docker0 on the Docker host. It also...