Managing services

Now that the swarm is up and running, it is time to look at services. A service is a collection of one or more tasks that do something. Each task is a container running somewhere in the swarm. Since services are potentially composed of multiple tasks, there are different tools to manage them. In most cases, these commands will be a subcommand of docker service.

Running containers as services in a swarm offers a number of benefits. They are as follows:

  • Services can be scaled out quickly and easily.
  • Swarm can perform zero-downtime upgrades where updated versions of an image are added while old versions are removed.
  • Easily create overlay networks to connect containers running on multiple hosts. (Overlay networks were covered in detail ...

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