Fan overlay network for container addresses

Jun 23, 2015 06:00 GMT  ·  By

On June 22, Canonical, the company behind the world's most popular free operating system, Ubuntu, and Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, had the great pleasure on introducing the Fan overlay network system in Ubuntu Linux.

The brand-new Fan overlay network system technology will be implemented in the test images of the Ubuntu Cloud operating system for the Google Compute Engine and Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud hosting providers.

Fan overlay network for container addresses is a new innovation from Canonical that promises to deliver the fastest and most scalable address expansion mechanism in the container world by enabling cloud users to grow the number of LXD and Docker containers that can be addressed in just one cloud environment.

"Containers are transforming the way people think about virtual machines (LXD) and apps (Docker)," says Mark Shuttleworth on his blog. "They give us much better performance and much better density for virtualisation in LXD, and with Docker, they enable new ways to move applications between dev, test and production."

Containers offer better performance than traditional KVM and ESX hypervisors

In order to better explain how the new Fan overlay network system works for the Ubuntu operating system, Mark Shuttleworth wrote a lengthy blog post where he stated, among many other interesting things, that containers provide much better performance and density over traditional KVM and ESX hypervisors.

According to Dustin Kirkland, a member of Canonical's Ubuntu Product and Strategy team, it would appear that containers come in no more than two complementary forms, application-centric containers like Rocket and Docker, as well as full machine containers from LXD.

However, the most important fact to know about the new Fan overlay network system technology is that it has been designed from the ground up to be capable of expanding the address space by 250x on each container host.