In the previous sections, we learned how to set up an AWS infrastructure using Terraform. We've designed a VPC that will house the Notes application stack, we experimented with a single-node Docker Swarm cluster built on a single EC2 instance, and we set up a procedure to push the Docker images to the ECR.
Our next task is to prepare a Docker stack file for deployment to the swarm. A stack file is nearly identical to the Docker compose file we used in Chapter 11, Deploying Node.js Microservices with Docker. Compose files are used with normal Docker hosts, but stack files are used with swarms. To make it a stack file, we add some new tags and change a few things, including the networking implementation.
Earlier, we kicked the tires of Docker Swarm with the docker service create command to launch a service on a swarm. While that was easy, it does not constitute code that can be committed to a source repository, nor is it an...