Book Image

Docker High Performance - Second Edition

By : Espinosa, Russ McKendrick
Book Image

Docker High Performance - Second Edition

By: Espinosa, Russ McKendrick

Overview of this book

Docker is an enterprise-grade container platform that allows you to build and deploy your apps. Its portable format lets you run your code right from your desktop workstations to popular cloud computing providers. This comprehensive guide will improve your Docker work?ows and ensure your application's production environment runs smoothly. This book starts with a refresher on setting up and running Docker and details the basic setup for creating a Docker Swarm cluster. You will then learn how to automate this cluster by using the Chef server and cookbooks. After that, you will run the Docker monitoring system with Prometheus and Grafana, and deploy the ELK stack. You will also learn best practices for optimizing Docker images. After deploying containers with the help of Jenkins, you will then move on to a tutorial on using Apache JMeter to analyze your application's performance. You will learn how to use Docker Swarm and NGINX to load-balance your application, and how common debugging tools in Linux can be used to troubleshoot Docker containers. By the end of this book, you will be able to integrate all the optimizations that you have learned and put everything into practice in your applications.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Building a benchmark workload


Writing benchmarks for an application is an open-ended area to explore. Apache JMeter can be overwhelming at first: it has several options to tune in order to write our benchmarks. To begin, we can use the story of our application as a start. The following are some of the questions we can ask ourselves:

  • What does our application do?
  • What is our users' demographic?
  • How do they interact with our application?

Starting with the preceding questions, we can then translate them into actual requests that we can use to test our application.

In the sample application that we wrote, we have a web application that displays Hello World to our users. In web applications, we are typically interested with the throughput and response time. Throughput refers to the number of users that can receive Hello World at a time. Response time describes the time lag before the user receives the Hello World message from the moment they requested it.

In this section, we will create a preliminary...