One of the prominent features of the Docker technology is linking containers. That is, cooperating containers can be linked together to offer complex and business-aware services. The linked containers have a kind of source-recipient relationship, wherein the source container gets linked to the recipient container, and the recipient securely receives a variety of information from the source container. However, the source container would know nothing about the recipients to which it is linked to. Another noteworthy feature of linking containers, in a secured setup, is that the linked containers can communicate using secured tunnels without exposing the ports used for the setup, to the external world.

The Docker engine provides the --link option in the docker run subcommand to link a source container to a recipient container.

The format of the --link option is as follows:

--link <container>:<alias>

Here, <container> is the name of the source container and...