Mini-project: Horizontally scale a web service using Docker

Estimated Duration: 2 hours

Author: Will Price, Codemanship

Language(s)/stacks: Any, Docker

Goal: Produce a simple web service that is easily overwhelmed by multiple concurrent requests. To handle more concurrent users run multiple instances of the service behind a reverse proxy to abstract away which instance you are querying. Dynamically scale the number of instances of the service whilst updating the reverse proxy configuration.

Summary:

Create a web service in your favourite language with the following end point GET /is_prime/<integer> that responds with the JSON: { “integer”: 1234, “is_prime”: false }

Do this using the square root search method: iterate a candidate factor variable up to the square root of the integer, for each number checking whether the remainder of the integer divided by the candidate factor is zero (if it is, then it is a factor), this has the worst case complexity O(\sqrt(n)) which is useful to demonstrate how you can increase request capacity by running multiple concurrent services.

• Dockerise your web service
• Run multiple instances of your web service and manually configure a reverse proxy to allocate requests using round robin scheduling.
• Dynamically configure the reverse proxy based on the running containers using nginx-proxy

Continuous Integration Extension:

• Build a container on each commit to your git repository using travis, jenkins, your favourite CI server.
• On a successful image build, push that image to the docker registry from your CI server.
• Set up docker hub web hooks to deploy an instance of your server to a host such as heroku, AWS, digital ocean, etc.
• Instead of using nginx-proxy, implement the dynamic upstream configuration on apache using docker-gen (the application that nginx-proxy utilises for dynamic configuration)

Example

See my own attempt on github