Honest answer: I don't. In short: most of the things have fixed config that is loaded into etcd cluster and different services in Docker containers use it to communicate with other containers/services (something like {rabbitmq_host: "host address"}. In the project I'm working on right now I have just 10 boxes which will probably grow to 20-30 in the coming months. It's nothing, I know, and as you can tell from the hacky nature of my setup I'm learning as I go about this, but I'm trying to incrementally improve different parts. Something like Kubernetes/Mesos seems like a next step.
In case you're interested, the next version of Docker (1.7) supports multi-host networking and dynamic service discovery out of the box.
The whole thing is pluggable and can use various distributed state backends (etcd, zookeeper etc) or IP connectivity backends (veth, macvlan, vxlan, openvpn etc) without changing your application. Service discovery uses DNS so you don't need to modify your application to take advantage of it. It's probably the most significant change to Docker in the last year.
This will make the integration with Kubernetes smoother. Currently Google is forced to rip out Docker's native networking stack because it is not flexible enough for their opinionated networking model. This causes many Docker applications to break in Kubernetes today. That problem should go away with Docker 1.7+ because Google-style networking can be expressed as a Docker plugin, which Kubernetes can load programmatically as part of its orchestration. An added benefit is that you can augment Docker with Google-style networking even if you use Kubernetes competitors like Mesos, Swarm, Cloudfoundry etc.
Hi Solomon, do you have an ETA for Docker 1.7? I see that it's currently in RC1. How soon will we be able to take advantage of libnetwork via Compose? Is there any documentation yet on how it will be done in Compose? Is there currently an easy way to try it via Boot2Docker?
Sorry about the barrage of questions. As you can probably guess, I'm very interested in trying this out.
