HTTP has become one of the most successful and heavily used network protocols around the world. Version 1.0 was created in 1996 and received a minor update 3 years later. But it took more than a decade to create HTTP/2 (which was approved in 2015). Why did it take so long? Well, I wouldn’t tell you all the truth if I didn’t mention an experimental protocol, called SPDY. SPDY was primarily focused on improving performance. The initial results were very promising and inside Google’s lab, the developers measured 55% speed improvement. This work and experience was converted into HTTP/2 proposal back in 2012. A few years later, we can all use HTTP/2 (sometimes called h2) along with its older brother - HTTP/1.1.

Connecting to Infinispan instances that run inside Docker for Mac using the Java Hot Rod client can be tricky. In this blog post we’ll be analyzing what makes this environment tricky and how to get around the issue.

The tricky thing about Docker for Mac is that internal container IP addresses are not accessible externally. This is a known issue and it can be hard to workaround it. In container orchestrators such as Openshift, you can use Routes to allow external access to the containers. However, if running vanilla Docker for Mac, the simplest option is to map ports over to the local machine.

Why is this important? When someone connects using the Hot Rod protocol, the server returns the current topology to the client. When Infinispan runs inside of Docker, this topology by default contains internal IP addresses. Since those are not accessible externally in Docker for Mac, the client won’t be able to connect.

To workaround the issue, Infinispan server Hot Rod endpoint can be configured with external host/port combination, but doing this would require modifying the server’s configuration. A simpler method to get around the issue is to configure the client’s intelligence to be Basic. By doing this the server won’t send topology updates nor will the client be able to locate where keys are located using hashing. This has a negative performance impact since all requests to Infinispan single server or server cluster would need to go over the same IP+port. However, for demo or sample applications on Mac environments, this is reasonable thing to do.

So, how do we do all of this?

First, start Infinispan server and map Hot Rod’s default port 11222 to the local 11222 port:

docker run -it -p 11222:11222 jboss/infinispan-server:9.2.0.Final

Open your IDE and create a project with this dependencies:

Finally, create a class that connects to Infinispan and does a simple put/get sequence:

Cheers, Galder

In one of the previous blog posts we wrote about different configuration options for our Docker image. Now we did another step adding auto-configuration steps for memory and CPU constraints.

The Infinispan Docker image has been improved, making it easier to run Infinispan Servers in clustered, domain and standalone modes, with different protocol stacks.

In this blog post we’ll show a few usage scenarios and how to combine it with the jgroups-gossip image to create Infinispan Server clusters in docker based environments.

As you may have noticed our Docker images are published together with (or very soon after) releases. But what if you want to try out some brand features which have just been merged? In that case you need to build an image by yourself.