Book Image

Containerization with LXC

Book Image

Containerization with LXC

Overview of this book

In recent years, containers have gained wide adoption by businesses running a variety of application loads. This became possible largely due to the advent of kernel namespaces and better resource management with control groups (cgroups). Linux containers (LXC) are a direct implementation of those kernel features that provide operating system level virtualization without the overhead of a hypervisor layer. This book starts by introducing the foundational concepts behind the implementation of LXC, then moves into the practical aspects of installing and configuring LXC containers. Moving on, you will explore container networking, security, and backups. You will also learn how to deploy LXC with technologies like Open Stack and Vagrant. By the end of the book, you will have a solid grasp of how LXC is implemented and how to run production applications in a highly available and scalable way.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Containerization with LXC
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Chapter 7. Monitoring and Backups in a Containerized World

In the previous chapter, we looked at a few examples of how to scale applications running inside LXC containers, by creating multiple instances behind a proxy service such as HAProxy. This ensures the application has enough resources and can withstand failures, thus achieving a level of high availability.

For applications running in a single LXC instance, it's often desirable to perform periodic backups of the container, which includes the root filesystem and the container's configuration file. Depending on the backing store, there are a few available options that we are going to explore in this chapter.

Using a highly available or shared backend store can help with quickly recovering from failed hosts, or when one needs to migrate LXC containers between servers. We are going to look at how to create containers on an Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) target and migrate LXC between servers. We are also going to look...