Swarm: a Docker-native clustering system

Docker Swarm is native clustering for Docker. It turns a pool of Docker hosts into a single, virtual host.

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Flynn, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

Like other Docker projects, Swarm follows the "batteries included but removable" principle. It ships with a set of simple scheduling backends out of the box, and as initial development settles, an API will be developed to enable pluggable backends. The goal is to provide a smooth out-of-the-box experience for simple use cases, and allow swapping in more powerful backends, like Mesos, for large scale production deployments.

Installation and documentation

Full documentation is available here.

Development installation

You can download and install from source instead of using the Docker image. Ensure you have golang, godep and the git client installed.

For example, on Ubuntu you'd run:

$ apt-get install golang git
$ go get github.com/tools/godep

You may need to set $GOPATH, e.g mkdir ~/gocode; export GOPATH=~/gocode.

For example, on Mac OS X you'd run:

$ brew install go
$ export GOPATH=~/go
$ export PATH=$PATH:~/go/bin
$ go get github.com/tools/godep

Then install the swarm binary:

$ mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/docker/
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/docker/
$ git clone https://github.com/docker/swarm
$ cd swarm
$ godep go install .

From here, you can follow the instructions in the main documentation, replacing docker run swarm with just swarm.

Participating

You can contribute to Docker Swarm in several different ways:

If you have comments, questions, or want to use your knowledge to help others, come join the conversation on IRC. You can reach us at #docker-swarm on Freenode.
To report a problem or request a feature, please file an issue
Of course, we welcome pull requests and patches. For information on making feature requests, follow the process suggested here.

Finally, if you want to see what we have for the future and learn more about our release cycles, all this information is detailed on the wiki

Creators

Andrea Luzzardi

Victor Vieux

Copyright and license