Docker Cookbook

Chapter 7. The Docker Ecosystem: Tools

7.0 Introduction

Docker in itself is extremely powerful and you now have covered all the topics to get you to a new way of writing distributed applications. However, Docker is even more powerful because of its large and vibrant ecosystem. This chapter presents a large set of tools in the Docker ecosystem.

To get started in this ecosystem we cover some tools that also come from Docker, Inc. If you have installed the Docker toolbox described in the first chapter you will have those tools already installed. Otherwise, each recipe shows you how to install them separately. First we show you how to use docker-compose in Recipe 7.1. Compose is way to describe a multicontainer application in a single YAML file. We look at our first example in this book, WordPress, and describe a compose file that allows you to run a WordPress site with two containers. We extend our look at Compose with a more complex example that shows you how to deploy a single-node Mesos cluster in Recipe 7.2. After Compose, we introduce Swarm in Recipe 7.3. A cluster manager for Docker, Swarm allows you to expose several Docker hosts behind a single Docker API endpoint. From the client side everything looks identical to a single-host setup, but Swarm can manage multiple hosts and schedule the containers on them. In Recipe 7.4, we illustrate how you can easily create your own Docker swarm cluster using docker-machine, which we introduced in the first chapter. This has the nice ...