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

Attaching directories from the host OS and exploring the running filesystem of a container


The root filesystem of LXC containers is visible from the host OS as a regular directory tree. We can directly manipulate files in a running container by just making changes in that directory. LXC also allows for attaching directories from the host OS inside the container using bind mount. A bind mount is a different view of the directory tree. It achieves this by replicating the existing directory tree under a different mount point.

  1. To demonstrate this, let's create a new container, directory, and a file on the host:

          root@ubuntu:~# mkdir /tmp/export_to_container
    
          root@ubuntu:~# hostname -f > /tmp/export_to_container/file
    
          root@ubuntu:~# lxc-create --name mount_container --template 
          ubuntu
    
          root@ubuntu:~#
    
  2. Next, we are going to use the lxc.mount.entry option in the configuration file of the container, telling LXC what directory to bind mount from the...