[nathan-osman]

I know, it's a bit difficult to explain and a tad confusing. No, the proxy is not sending any traffic to the container. Rather, the container, by simple virtue of being in the running state, tells the proxy to send requests to the domain specified by the label on the container.

[djhworld]

What happens if the container isn't running?

[nathan-osman]

Then the proxy will not route requests to the host specified by the container's label.

[radarsat1]

You're using the running state flag of a container as an IPC mechanism?

[nathan-osman]

Essentially, yes. And the labels.