Top 5 Docker Swarm tutorials

by Alex Ellis

At Dockercon '16 in Seattle last June Docker released a complete re-think on their orchestration offering called Swarm. Swarm has been gaining momentum and key features ever since.

Get ready for Dockercon 2017 with my top 5 Docker Swarm tutorials



Pictured - Serverless FaaS on Raspberry Pi with Swarm

You can read more about Dockercon in Seattle in my Dockercon 2016 speaker notes.

1. Get to scale in 5 minutes

My first tutorial on the new Swarm offering (also called Swarm Mode) was written and tested with a pre-release candidate of Docker. I wrote this the night before the official announcement in Seattle.

It's still as relevant today as it was last year. Get started in 5 minutes.

Learn Docker Swarm Mode - scale in 5 minutes!

2. Work with a real micro-service

My second tutorial on Swarm mode focused on a small microservice written in Node.js. If you're wondering how to get started with Node and Swarm then you will find everything you need here.

Scale a real microservice with Docker 1.12 Swarm Mode

3. Swarm Deep dive on Raspberry Pi

Installing Docker on a Raspberry Pi has never been easier. The Raspberry Pi foundation covered Docker on their official blog earlier last year and this generated a lot of interest in Swarm on the Pi.

The Raspberry Pi is effectively a very cheap, networkable PC and whatever applies to a PC or cloud server can normally be run on a Pi too.

Docker comes to Raspberry Pi

The Pi is an accessible platform for teaching and demonstrating distributed computing. In this blog post I go into deeper detail on how to set up your RPi swarm and how to test different aspects of inter-container communication.

Live Deep Dive - Docker Swarm Mode on the Pi

The video uses a set of tests that cover everything from scaling to inter-container communication via DNS.

Swarm Mode test scenarios

4. Test-drive Docker Healthchecks

Healthchecks are an essential feature for deploying your production application. They provide a way for your container to check itself periodically. Swarm's self-healing mechanism can then intervene and help resolve issues automatically.

Test-drive Docker Healthcheck in 10 minutes

5. Secret management

Swarm now provides a built-in and secure method to manage confidential secrets, tokens and keys. This blog post goes into detail on how to apply secret management to an integration with a real-world service.

Docker Secrets in action: Github integration

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