Distributed systems built with Docker make it easy to operate fleets of containers, where new services spin up and down on demand every second. A key challenge for such distributed systems is figuring out how to get traffic flowing to the application containers running on multiple hosts and ports. Vulcand is an HTTP load balancer built with the solution to this problem in mind. It supports dynamic service discovery and traffic routing via Etcd - the discovery and configuration service from CoreOS.

In this talk we will cover some of the high level features of Vulcand. We will also explore real world scenarios in which vulcand is used to achieve zero-downtime deployments of API processes, and detect service degradations caused by bugs in new releases.