What references do you recommend for learning about container networking? For example:
Take a look at simos blog: https://blog.simos.info/how-to-get-lxd-containers-get-ip-from-the-lan-with-routed-network/
https://blog.simos.info/how-to-use-the-lxd-proxy-device-to-map-ports-between-the-host-and-the-containers/
And the network docs:
https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/docs/master/networks
Its general linux networking and its wide and varied, huge subject and getting bigger all the time. It comes down to route, bridge or doing something with proxy arp or nat, tunneling or maybe a few other tricks like macvlan/ipvlan which I don’t ever use and don’t know much about.
Install Free Range routing on the host and you can advertise your container networks via BGP to an upstream host, which could be the “WAN” (for north/south traffic)
Use overlay networks to span container networks over multiple hosts, using something like fan bridges, zerotier, nebula or bgp evpn with vxlan (for east west traffic).
Then you can throw in load balancers like HAproxy at scale.
Easiest is just use the default bridge and nat masquerade on outbound(egress), port forward the specific services inbound(ingress).
What are Free Range routing and BGP?
What are overlay networks? This concept and these tools are new to me.
Using VirtualBox, I did manage to forward port 2222 from a VirtualBox guest (the LXD host) to SSH port 22 on a container using a NAT network interface. I presume that VirtualBox managed the outgoing virtual NAT masquerade. I used the VirtualBox guest as an SSH jump host to forward the SSH connection to the container.
How difficult is it to configure a network route to a container? Assuming a Windows host and VirtualBox guest serving as the LXD host, in which host would I configure this route?
If you are just testing this out in a windows host then easiest is to just portforward on windows host inbound to the linux vm.
I’d leave the more complex networking for when you are going to run LXD on multiple servers.
Rent a couple of cheap cloud servers or a couple of bare metals in hetzner, string together a vpn mesh and then setup lxd on something like that and that would be a better introduction to linux networking.
Yeah hetzner, they do decent servers, similar to soyoustart/ovh.