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Application Servers

First, we need to start some application servers so that our load balancer has somewhere to send the traffic! We'll use Caddy, an awesome open-source load balancer and web server. Nginx and Apache are other popular alternatives that do similar things, but Caddy is a modern version written in Go, so it'll be fun to use.

What Will Our Servers Do?

Each application server will serve a slightly different HTML webpage. We'll make them different so that we can see load balancing in action!

Assignment

Pull down the official caddy image:

docker pull caddy

Create an index1.html file in your working directory:

<html>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello from server 1</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Create an index2.html file in your working directory:

<html>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello from server 2</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Run a container for index1.html on port 8881:

docker run -d -p 8881:80 -v $PWD/index1.html:/usr/share/caddy/index.html caddy

Run a container for index2.html on port 8882:

docker run -d -p 8882:80 -v $PWD/index2.html:/usr/share/caddy/index.html caddy

Navigate to localhost:8881 in a browser. You should see "Hello from server 1".
Navigate to localhost:8882 in a browser. You should see "Hello from server 2".

Run and submit the CLI tests.