Introduction to Docker Swarm

Till the last section, we were learning from the developer’s perspective. This section will give you a little exposure to DevOps using Docker.

Setting our expectations

This course focuses on development using Docker. We have covered all the things required from a developer’s perspective. With this, you will be able to develop web apps using Docker easily.

However, you might want to understand a little bit about deployment to know what is going on in your project. So, this section will provide you with a high-level understanding of the swarm architecture to have a conceptual understanding of the production environment that is deployed using the Docker swarm.

So, let’s start.

What is container orchestration?

Suppose you have developed a wonderful application that will be used by millions of users. How will it be deployed efficiently without having a single point failure to handle a large number of requests?

Managing systems at a large scale are very difficult. Millions of containers run on different machines. How will you track which container has stopped or which service is no longer running?

Managing this cluster of containers effectively is called container orchestration. At present, there are three major tools available that help in container orchestration namely, Docker swarm, Kubernetes, and Apache Mesos.

In the rest of the lessons, we will learn more about the Docker swarm.

What is the Docker Swarm?

Docker swarm is a container orchestration tool that allows a user to manage multiple containers deployed across multiple host machines. Docker swarm has different components which help it to manage the swarm effectively. Let’s have a look at the architecture to understand how it works.