What we have set up is essentially a blank slate. AWS has a long list of offerings that could be deployed to the VPC that we've created. What we're looking to do in this section is to set up a single EC2 instance to install Docker, and set up a single-node Docker Swarm cluster. We'll use this to familiarize ourselves with Docker Swarm. In the remainder of the chapter, we'll build more servers to create a larger swarm cluster for full deployment of Notes.
A Docker Swarm cluster is simply a group of servers running Docker that have been joined together into a common pool. The code for the Docker Swarm orchestrator is bundled with the Docker Engine server but it is disabled by default. To create a swarm, we simply enable swarm mode by running docker swarm init and then run a docker swarm join command on each system we want to be part of the cluster. From there, the Docker Swarm code automatically takes care of a long list of...