Docker overlay network using Flannel

The first thing you need once you start scaling up your containers on different hosts is a consistent networking model, the primary requirement of which is to enable two(or more) containers on different hosts to talk to each other.  Now port forwarding might give you the same result when dealing with less number of containers but this approach gets out of control very quickly and you’re left to wade through port forwarding mess. What we want in situations like these is a network where each container on every hosts gets a unique IP address from a global namespace and all containers can then talk to each other.