Setting Up a Swarm

Docker has made great strides in advancing development and operational agility, portability, and cost savings by leveraging containers. You can see a lot of benefits even when you use a single Docker host. But when container applications reach a certain level of complexity or scale, you need to make use of several machines. Container orchestration products and tools allow you to manage multiple container hosts in concert. Docker swarm mode is one such tool. In this lesson, we’ll explain the architecture of Docker swarm mode, and go through lots of demos to perfect your swarm mode skills. 

Learning Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

• Describe what Docker swarm mode can accomplish.
• Explain the architecture of a swarm mode cluster.
• Use the Docker CLI to manage nodes in a swarm mode cluster.
• Use the Docker CLI to manage services in a swarm mode cluster.
• Deploy multi-service applications to a swarm using stacks.

Intended Audience

This lesson is for anyone interested in orchestrating distributed systems at any scale. This includes:

• DevOps Engineers
• Site Reliability Engineers
• Cloud Engineers
• Software Engineers

Prerequisites

This is an intermediate-level lesson that assumes:

• You have experience working with Docker and Docker Compose