Hello from the otherside.... (inside the container)

#vDM30in30 - 7

Hello!

I have used ec2 tags to gather information into facter, and I had wanted to duplicate that same kind of logic using docker containers and labels... Unfortunately it seems like labels are 'external' only to the container.
I found several issues which all end up pointing at this 'introspection' issue.
https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/8427

It looks like the only way currently is to have some sort of external service manage that information for you (etcd/consul/mesos/pass it in via environment variables to your container / kubernettes downward-api) OR to mount the docker socket inside your container and go through the json output (not very secure)

Reasons for getting that information seem to range from enabling service discovery (knowing what actual host/IP you are bound to) to knowing what size JVM heap args to set inside a container based on actual container run environment.

It seems like memory information was added with https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/13312/files which allows a readonly mount of the /sys/fs/cgroup location specific to the container...

$ docker run --rm -it --entrypoint /bin/bash puppet/puppet-agent-ubuntu

root@96acc60738a7:/# cat /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/memory.max_usage_in_bytes
19025920
root@96acc60738a7:/# exit
exit
$ docker run -m 2048m --rm -it --entrypoint /bin/bash puppet/puppet-agent-ubuntu
WARNING: Your kernel does not support swap limit capabilities, memory limited without swap.
root@dab851113412:/#  cat /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/memory.max_usage_in_bytes
2654208
root@dab851113412:/#