In the last chapter, we introduced orchestrators. Like a conductor in an orchestra, an orchestrator makes sure that all our containerized application services play together nicely and contribute harmoniously to a common goal. Such orchestrators have quite a few responsibilities, which we have discussed in detail. Finally, we have provided a short overview of the most important container orchestrators on the market.
This chapter introduces Docker's native orchestrator, SwarmKit. It elaborates on all the concepts and objects SwarmKit uses to deploy and run a distributed, resilient, robust, and highly available application in a cluster on-premise or in the cloud. The chapter also introduces how SwarmKit ensures secure applications by using a software defined network (SDN) to isolate containers. Additionally, this chapter demonstrates how to install a highly available Docker Swarm in the cloud. It introduces the routing mesh which provides layer-4 routing...