Sharing your data in a cluster

Occasionally, you might be in a situation where you need to spin up several of the same containers in a cluster and share data amongst them.

For Example:
It'd be a pain to have to upload a license for each container and it might be especially annoying if you need to spin up the container dynamically. In order to get around this problem, you can "share" your license key with other containers in your cluster via a docker volume mounted to your containers (assuming you're running locally), or via a shared EFS volume on AWS.

Local Setup

To do this locally, you can do the following using the CLI:

1. Create your shared volume. I named it "shared-lic-vol" but you can call it whatever you want.

$> docker volume create shared-lic-vol

shared-lic-vol

2. Verify that your volume was created sucessfully

$> docker volume ls

DRIVER    VOLUME NAME
local     shared-lic-vol

3. Inspect it, in order to find the Mountpoint.

$> docker volume inspect shared-lic-vol
[
    {
        "CreatedAt": "2022-04-29T21:40:59Z",
        "Driver": "local",
        "Labels": {},
        "Mountpoint": "/var/lib/docker/volumes/shared-lic-vol/_data",
        "Name": "shared-lic-vol",
        "Options": {},
        "Scope": "local"
    }
]

4. Run your first container, providing the environment variable GAI_VOLUME_PATH which should be where you mount your docker volume. Note the -v flag, which is something like name-of-volume:where-you-mount-that-volume. Finally, somewhat obviously, line continuation characters might vary depending on if you use powershell (windows), terminal (mac, linux, etc.). You can just...all put it on the same line too, if you're into that sort of thing.

One long string

docker run -d --env GAI_VOLUME_PATH=/var/lib/docker/volumes/shared-lic-vol/_data -v shared-lic-vol:/var/lib/docker/volumes/shared-lic-vol/_data -p 7000:80 gx-images:t-995cb56d6c10472fa23649271c9d9b92

Windows (powershell)

PS C:\Users\Me\Downloads> docker run -d --env GAI_VOLUME_PATH=/var/lib/docker/volumes/shared-lic-vol/_data `
>> -v shared-lic-vol:/var/lib/docker/volumes/shared-lic-vol/_data `
>> -p 7000:80 gx-images:t-995cb56d6c10472fa23649271c9d9b92
2f0e9d26447fcd6bf00980c133107fbb6d7e4bdc32e8aa46ad435b4d0efe16e8

Linux/Mac (terminal)

$> docker run -d --env GAI_VOLUME_PATH=/var/lib/docker/volumes/shared-lic-vol/_data \
> -v shared-lic-vol:/var/lib/docker/volumes/shared-lic-vol/_data \
> -p 7000:80 gx-images:t-995cb56d6c10472fa23649271c9d9b92
2f0e9d26447fcd6bf00980c133107fbb6d7e4bdc32e8aa46ad435b4d0efe16e8