In the past months I have made several attempts to explore Docker overlay networks, but there were a few pieces to set up before I could really experiment and… well, let’s say that I have probably approached the problem the wrong way and wasted some time along the way. Not again. I have set aside some time and worked agile enough to do the whole job, from start to finish. Nowadays there is little point in creating overlay networks by hand, except that it’s still a good learning experience. And a learning experience with Docker and networking was exactly what I was after.

When I started exploring multi-host Docker networks, Docker was quite different than it is now. In particular, Docker Swarm didn’t exist yet, and there was a certain amount of manual work required in order to create an overlay network, so that containers located in different hosts can communicate.

Before Swarm, in order to set up an overlay network one needed to:

• have at least two docker hosts to establish an overlay network;
• have a supported key/value store available for the docker hosts to sync information;
• configure the docker hosts to use the key/value store;
• create an overlay network on one of the docker host; if everything worked well, the network will “propagate” to the other docker hosts that had registered with the key/value store;
• create named containers on different hosts; then try and ping each other using the names: if everything was done correctly, you would be able to ping the containers through the overlay network.

This looks like simple high-level checklist. I’ll now describe the actual steps needed to get this working, leaving the details of my failuers to the last section of this post.

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