All articles on Networking

What is a web server?

Let's start by answering the question: What is a web server?

First off, it's a server (no pun intended). A server is a process [sic] serving clients. Surprisingly or not, a server has nothing to do with hardware. It's just a regular piece of software run by an operating system. Like most other programs around, a server gets some data on its input, transforms data in accordance with some business logic, and then produces some output data. In the case of a web server, the input and output happen over the network via Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). For a web server, the input consists of HTTP requests from its clients - web browsers, mobile applications, IoT devices, or even other web services. And the output consists of HTTP responses, oftentimes in form of HTML pages, but other formats are also supported.

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Before jumping to any Kubernetes specifics, let's talk about the service discovery problem in general.

What is Service Discovery

In the world of web service development, it's a common practice to run multiple copies of a service at the same time. Every such copy is a separate instance of the service represented by a network endpoint (i.e. some IP and port) exposing the service API. Traditionally, virtual or physical machines have been used to host such endpoints, with the shift towards containers in more recent times. Having multiple instances of the service running simultaneously increases its availability and helps to adjust the service capacity to meet the traffic demand. On the other hand, it also complicates the overall setup - before accessing the service, a client (the term client is intentionally used loosely here; oftentimes a client of some service is another service) needs to figure out the actual IP address and the port it should use. The situation becomes even more tricky if we add the ephemeral nature of instances to the equation. New instances come and existing instances go because of the non-zero failure rate, up- and downscaling, or maintenance. That's how a so-called service discovery problem arises.

Service discovery problem.

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Just kidding, it's not... But fear not and read on!

Working with containers always feels like magic. In a good way for those who understand the internals and in a terrifying - for those who don't. Luckily, we've been looking under the hood of the containerization technology for quite some time already and even managed to uncover that containers are just isolated and restricted Linux processes, that images aren't really needed to run containers, and on the contrary - to build an image we need to run some containers.

Now comes a time to tackle the container networking problem. Or, more precisely, a single-host container networking problem. In this article, we are going to answer the following questions:

• How to virtualize network resources to make containers think each of them has a dedicated network stack?
• How to turn containers into friendly neighbors, prevent them from interfering, and teach to communicate well?
• How to reach the outside world (e.g. the Internet) from inside the container?
• How to reach containers running on a machine from the outside world (aka port publishing)?

While answering these questions, we'll setup a container networking from scratch using standard Linux tools. As a result, it'll become apparent that the single-host container networking is nothing more than a simple combintion of the well-known Linux facilities:

• network namespaces;
• virtual Ethernet devices (veth);
• virtual network switches (bridge);
• IP routing and network address translation (NAT).

And for better or worse, no code is required to make the networking magic happen...

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Traefik is The Cloud Native Edge Router yet another reverse proxy and load balancer. Omitting all the Cloud Native buzzwords, what really makes Traefik different from Nginx, HAProxy, and alike is the automatic and dynamic configurability it provides out of the box. And the most prominent part of it is probably its ability to do automatic service discovery. If you put Traefik in front of Docker, Kubernetes, or even an old-fashioned VM/bare-metal deployment and show it how to fetch the information about the running services, it'll automagically expose them to the outside world. If you follow some conventions of course...

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How services talk to each other?

Imagine you're developing a service... For certainty, let's call it A. It's going to provide some public HTTP API to its clients. However, to serve requests it needs to call another service. Let's call this upstream service - B.

Obviously, neither network nor service B is ideal. If service A wants to decrease the impact of the failing upstream requests on its public API success rate, it has to do something about errors. For instance, it could start retrying failed requests.

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