So far we have learned how to launch individual Docker hosts locally using Docker for Mac, Docker for Windows, and Docker Machine for remote hosts, as well as using Docker locally on Linux. Individual Docker hosts are great for local development, or launching a few test instances however as you start moving towards production you need fewer single points of failure.
In this chapter, we are going to get a little more adventurous and create a cluster of Docker hosts. Docker ships a tool called Swarm, when deployed it acts as a scheduler between your Docker client and the Docker host, deciding where to launch containers based on scheduling rules.
We are going to look at the following topics:
Manually launching a Docker Swarm cluster
Launching Docker for Amazon Web Services
Launching Docker for Azure
And also how to launch containers within our cluster.