Chapter 7. Monitoring and Backups in a Containerized World

In the previous chapter, we looked at a few examples of how to scale applications running inside LXC containers, by creating multiple instances behind a proxy service such as HAProxy. This ensures the application has enough resources and can withstand failures, thus achieving a level of high availability.

For applications running in a single LXC instance, it's often desirable to perform periodic backups of the container, which includes the root filesystem and the container's configuration file. Depending on the backing store, there are a few available options that we are going to explore in this chapter.

Using a highly available or shared backend store can help with quickly recovering from failed hosts, or when one needs to migrate LXC containers between servers. We are going to look at how to create containers on an Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) target and migrate LXC between servers. We are also going to look...