Applications requirements and networking environments are diverse and sometimes opposing forces. In between applications and the network sits Docker networking, affectionately called the Container Network Model or CNM. It’s CNM that brokers connectivity for your Docker containers and also what abstracts away the diversity and complexity so common in networking.
The result is portability and it comes from CNM’s powerful network drivers. These are pluggable interfaces for the Docker Engine, Swarm, and UCP that provide special capabilities like multi-host networking, network layer encryption, and service discovery.
Naturally, the next question is which network driver should I use? Each driver offers tradeoffs and has different advantages depending on the use case. There are built-in network drivers that come included with Docker Engine and there are also plug-in network drivers offered by networking vendors and the community. The most commonly used built-in network drivers are bridge, overlay and macvlan. Together they cover a very broad list of networking use cases and environments.
Bridge Network Driver
The bridge networking driver is the first driver on our list. Continue reading…
