Production Patterns & Orchestration

Running containers in development is straightforward. Running them reliably in production requires careful attention to logging, health checks, restart policies, resource management, and orchestration. This lesson covers the patterns and tools that make containers production-ready.

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Container Logging

Logging Drivers

Docker supports multiple logging drivers. The default is json-file, which stores logs as JSON on the host.

Driver	Description
json-file	Default; logs stored as JSON files on host
syslog	Sends logs to a syslog server
journald	Sends logs to systemd journal
fluentd	Sends logs to Fluentd
awslogs	Sends logs to AWS CloudWatch
gcplogs	Sends logs to Google Cloud Logging
none	Disables logging

Configuring the Logging Driver

# Use the json-file driver with rotation
docker run -d \
  --log-driver json-file \
  --log-opt max-size=10m \
  --log-opt max-file=3 \
  my-app:latest

# Send logs to syslog
docker run -d \
  --log-driver syslog \
  --log-opt syslog-address=tcp://logserver:514 \
  my-app:latest

In Docker Compose

services:
  api:
    image: my-api:latest
    logging:
      driver: json-file
      options:
        max-size: "10m"
        max-file: "3"

Logging Best Practices