It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, most of my posts have been on my ham radio blog, so I thought I would post some cool things I’ve been playing with recently.

Rackspace just announced Carina which is a container runtime environment based on OpenStack Magnum. When I signed up, I wanted to have something I could accomplish with this new technology and thought of RethinkDB and its clustering capabilities. Sure you can do all this on your desktop/laptop, but what fun is that?

To get started you’ve got to sign up for Carina at https://getcarina.com. Carina is a runtime environment for container engines and in this case, it is using docker. In order to get started, follow this handy tutorial. Once you can create a docker swarm and the first instance, come back here.

Now, here is the fun part of how easy it is to create a RethinkDB cluster. We have to create a master instance, using the RethinkDB docker image

docker run -d -P --name rethinkdb-m rethinkdb

Now after you’ve done that you’ll probably want to see what ports are exposed on which IPs:

docker port rethinkdb-m

In my case:

$> docker port rethinkdb-m
28015/tcp -> 172.99.77.87:32787
29015/tcp -> 172.99.77.87:32786
8080/tcp -> 172.99.77.87:32788

The web console for my cluster is at 172.99.77.87:32788

Now if you’ve played with RethinkDB, you’ve already been here a few times before. Here is where the cool stuff starts.

We want to now create 5 docker instances that will use the master we just created. Docker has a command called link that lets you link one container to another. In addition, the /etc/hosts file of the new containers we are going to create will have an IP entry for rethinkdb-m. Our creation is going to look like this:

docker run -d -P --name rethinkdb-1 --link rethinkdb-m:masterdb rethinkdb rethinkdb --join rethinkdb-m --bind all

So what happens there? We override the normal command of starting rethink with

rethinkdb --join rethinkdb-m --bind all

The join tells RethinkDB to join the other cluster, on the default port using the hostname of rehinkdb-m. If you were to create a docker instance and just load bash, you could grep /etc/hosts and there would be an entry for rethinkdb-m:

$> docker run -i -t --link rethinkdb-m:masterdb ubuntu grep "rethinkdb-m" /etc/hosts                                                                                                              ssimpson@outback
172.17.0.12 masterdb 3d5f6dcc5cd8 rethinkdb-m
172.17.0.12 rethinkdb-m
172.17.0.12 rethinkdb-m.bridge

So how do we create a bunch of containers all running RethinkDB linked back to the master:

for i in {1..5}; do
docker run -d -P --name rethinkdb-$i --link rethinkdb-m:masterdb rethinkdb rethinkdb --join rethinkdb-m --bind all;
done;

And:

wow

Very cool, big props to the Carina team at Rackspace and the RethinkDB folks for having an awesome project!