swarm

Recently, I noticed logs for one of my web services had strange entries that looked like a bot trying to perform scripted attacks on an application endpoint. I was surprised, because all the endpoints that were exposed over the public Internet were protected by some form of authentication, or were locked down to specific IP addresses—or so I thought.

I had re-architected the service using Docker in the past year, and in the process of doing so, I changed the way the application ran—instead of having one server per process, I ran a group of processes on one server, and routed traffic to them using DNS names (one per process) and Nginx to proxy the traffic.

In this new setup, I built a custom firewall using iptables rules (since I had to control for a number of legacy services that I have yet to route through Docker—someday it will all be in Kubernetes), installed Docker, and set up a Docker Compose file (one per server) that ran all the processes in containers, using ports like 1234, 1235, etc.

The Docker Compose port declaration for each service looked like this: