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

We welcome pull requests and patches; come say hi on IRC, #docker-swarm on freenode.

Our planning process and release cycle are detailed on the wiki

Creators

Andrea Luzzardi

• http://twitter.com/aluzzardi
• http://github.com/aluzzardi

Victor Vieux

• http://twitter.com/vieux
• http://github.com/vieux

Copyright and license

Code and documentation copyright 2014-2015 Docker, inc. Code released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Docs released under Creative commons.