Running Apache Geode in a Docker Container

Apache Geode is a distributed, in-memory database with strong data consistency. It's also the basis for a powerful commercial implementation that runs in Cloud Foundry.

"Pivotal Cloud Cache (PCC) is a specialized implementation of Pivotal GemFire, Pivotal’s commercial caching product based on Apache Geode." This quote comes from a good article covering the balancing act between Availability and Consistency of this technology.

In any of it's three variations, it can provide a strong foundation for a 12 Factor application that needs a persistence layer (Geode also supports read-through, write-through and overflow techniques).

Start Geode in a Docker container

To get started playing around with Geode, it's easy to spin up a Docker container. There is one gotcha, that I'll describe a workaround for. Ideally, someone more Docker savvy can let me know a better method to access Geode from the host OS.

docker run -p 8080:8080 -p 10334:10334 -p 40404:40404 -p 1099:1099 -p 7070:7070 -it apachegeode/geode

Start a Locator and a Server

Once the container starts, you'll have an interactive shell active from which you can start Geode services. The "gee-fish" prompt is a shortened name for the GemFire Shell.

gfsh > start locator 

Note the hostname it starts on. It will be output from the previous command in a format like: "d26f1ea42d39[10334]".

gfsh > start server

Setup a Geode Region

Next, create a region that will host your application data.

gfsh > create region --name=hello-world-region --type=REPLICATE

Access the Geode from a Windows OS Host

To reach the Geode services controller from outside of the container, I had to implement a small networking hack.  Edit your Windows "C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts" file to give the address "127.0.0.1" an alias matching the locator host address noted above.

For the location host shown above, the hosts entry would look like this:

127.0.0.1       localhost   d26f1ea42d39

Running a Simple Java Client

I created a simple GitHub repo containing a Java client application to verify that the container is up and accepting data flow to the defined region: https://github.com/thecodebeneath/geodeclient

To run the simple Spring Boot client that writes some data to Geode, run the Maven command:

> mvn spring-boot:run

Query the Geode region for data by running this command from the container prompt:

gfsh > query --query='select * from /hello-world-region'

Summary

I hope this is a helpful bootstrap to get up and running with a Geode instance.

If you know of a way to avoid the Windows hosts file edit, please let me know - I'm always ready to learn something new!