bretfisher / awesome-swarm

All the awesome tools, docs, and training on Docker and Mirantis Swarm Mode (SwarmKit)

Awesome Swarm

An awesome list of tools and info on Swarm Mode (SwarmKit)

Swarm (Swarm Mode, SwarmKit) is the simple orchestration and scheduling system built into Moby, Docker Engine, and Mirantis Container Engine (MCE). It is a distributed system that allows you to create and manage a cluster of container runtimes (nodes) and the container workloads running on them.

This Awesome List is maintained by @BretFisher and @s4ke. This is a curated list of working and awesome tools and resources for using Swarm. It is not an official list, but a community effort to help people find the best stuff for Swarm in 2023 and beyond.

Contents

• Recent News and Updates
• Official Main Resources
• Chat and Forums
• Community Tools
  • Cluster Management
  • Extra Functionality
  • Volumes and Storage
  • Networking
  • Monitoring
• Community Tutorials and Education
  • Courses and Videos
  • Articles and Sample Code
• Organisations Using Swarm
• RIP
• Contributing
• Maintainers

Recent News and Updates

• Mirantis - What's next for Swarm
• Mirantis - Kubernetes vs Swarm - These companies use both
• Mirantis - Committed to Swarm
• Mirantis - Announcing the 23.0 major release for Mirantis Container Runtime — and Moby

Official Main Resources

• Docker Swarm Docs
• Mirantis Swarm Homepage
• MCR - Mirantis Container Runtime Homepage - The Mirantis dockerd variant that supports Swarm Mode.
• Mirantis Docs - Search Swarm for the various docs related to Swarm orchestration.
• SwarmKit Repository - The upstream project that provides Swarm features to a container runtime.
• Swarm Stack File reference - Compose file v3 format that works in Swarm for "stack files".

Chat and Forums

• Discord - Cloud Native DevOps - Maintained by Bret Fisher and friends. Join the very active #swarm channel.
• SwarmKit.org Forum - Maintained by Portainer's co-founder Neil Cresswell.
• Stack Overflow Swarm tag

Community Tools

Cluster Management

• Portainer - A management UI that allows you to control Docker hosts, Swarm clusters, and Kubernetes clusters.
• Swarmpit - Lightweight mobile-friendly Docker Swarm management UI.
• AWS Docker Swarm Terraform Module
• Swarmsible - Tooling to create and manage Docker Swarm clusters based on Ansible.
• Dockersamples Swarm Visualizer - A basic web GUI visualizing a Swarm cluster. More of a concept and teaching UI than a production tool.
• Swarm Dashboard - A Simple Monitoring Dashboard for Docker Swarm Cluster.
• swarmgate - Multitenancy for Docker Swarm - Docker Socket Proxy for use with Docker Swarm to have multiple tenants on a single Swarm.
• Spin - A lightweight tool that helps developers manage applications from development to production using Docker Compose, Docker Swarm, and Ansible.

Extra Functionality

• Swarm Cronjob - By @crazy-max. Create jobs on a time-based schedule.
• Shepherd - Automatically update services whenever their image is refreshed.
• Gantry - a tool to update docker swarm services, enhanced Shepherd.
• Swarm Sync - GitOps for Swarm.
• docker-stack-deploy (docker-sdp) - Automatic config/secret rotation for Docker stacks.
• nothelm.py - Opinionated docker stack project tool with templating support.
• docker-stack-wait - Tool to wait for your docker stack deployments to finish.
• docker-swarm-proxy - CLI plugin to that allows to exec into services. docker exec for Swarm.

Volumes and Storage

Swarm previously only supported local volumes, NFS, and a limited set of Docker Engine Plugin drivers that supported Swarm Mode. Driver support has dwindled over time as vendors moved to Kubernetes. In 2023, with the Docker Engine v23.x release, Docker Engine and Swarm Mode gained the Container Storage Interface (CSI) standard. Existing CSI drivers will need to add Swarm support.

• CSI support issue tracking in 2023 - A GitHub repository tracking various storage drivers PRs and issues for Swarm CSI support in Docker/Moby v23+.
• GlusterFS - GlusterFS is a scale-out network-attached storage file system.
• Ceph - Ceph is a distributed object, block, and file storage platform. Do you want Ceph CSI support? Upvote this issue
• Docker Volume plugin for RBD (Ceph) - Docker Engine managed plugin to for RBD Ceph volumes.
• juicefs - JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of S3. It has a maintained Docker plugin.
• Portworx - Portworx is a container-native storage solution. It supports Swarm installs. Free for up to three nodes.
• NetApp Trident - A NetApp storage driver that has been known to work with Docker Engine and Swarm in the past. CSI Swarm support has been requested.
• Hetzner Cloud Docker Volume Plugin - Unofficial volume driver for Hetzner Cloud by @costela.
• Hetzner Cloud Volume CSI Driver - Hetzner Cloud Volume CSI Driver with experimental support for Docker Swarm.

Networking

• Swarm Ports - List and description of all the ports used by Swarm Mode (and the very old classic Swarm, if you're into that).
• Libnetwork Troubleshooting - Official Doc on using network diagnostic tools.
• Traefik Proxy - A reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying HTTP (and more) published services easy. Swarm Mode docs start here.
• Caddy Docker Proxy - Caddy based reverse proxy with automatic service discovery based on labels.
• rawdns - a direct, raw DNS interface to the Docker API.

Monitoring

• docker-engine-events-exporter - Prometheus Exporter for Docker Engine Events.
• docker-engine-networks-exporter - Prometheus Exporter for additional network metrics such as usable ips.
• promswarm - Modernized version of Swarmprom, a great Prometheus/Grafana stack originally by @stefanprodan, now maintained by @neuroforgede.

Community Tutorials and Education

Courses and Videos

• Docker Mastery, with Kubernetes and Swarm - Via Docker Captain Bret Fisher. The most popular paid mega-course on Docker, Kubernetes, and Swarm. The link includes a coupon.
• Docker Swarm Mastery - Via Docker Captain Bret Fisher. The most popular paid course focusing on Docker Swarm (assumes you have basic Docker/Compose knowledge). The link includes a coupon.
• Docker Swarm Design and Production Tools from Bret Fisher at DockerCon - YouTube. DockerCon 2018. 40 minutes.

Articles and Sample Code

• Docker Swarm Rocks - Collection of tutorials and code samples.
• Vault + Swarm - Vault + Swarm Docker secrets plugin (proof of concept).
• dogvs.cat Sample Swarm Stacks - Sample Docker Swarm cluster stack of tools including Traefik.
• Swarm vs. Compose for Production - Only one host for a production environment. What to use: docker-compose or single node swarm?
• Cheat Sheet on Docker and Swarm 2022
• Podlike - Viktor Adam's idea on how you could link multiple containers together to emulate a Kubernetes pod.
• Operating Swarm - Useful tips for operating and troubleshooting Docker Swarm in production.

Organisations Using Swarm

• Co-op Cloud
• NeuroForge

Related Awesome Lists

While this list is focused on Docker Swarm resources, general resources such as ones for Docker or Docker Compose can be helpful. The following keeps track of related awesome lists focused on this.

• awesome-docker - A list of awesome Docker tools.
• awesome-compose - A list of awesome Docker Compose samples.

RIP

Honorable mentions of tools and information that are no longer maintained or supported. It may still work, but it's not being updated.

• RexRay - A container storage orchestration engine.

Contributing

This list thrives on contributions from the community. The Maintainers can't do it alone. We need Swarm fans to help us find the best Swarm resources.

Want to contribute? Please read the contribution guidelines. You can also ask questions in the GitHub Discussions, or our Discord Server #swarm channel.

Maintainers

We're looking for more maintainers. Make some PRs to help, then LMK in Discussions, Twitter, or Discord (above) if you'd like to get involved in making a better community for Swarm.

awesome-swarm's Issues

Research and fix/ignore Awesome Lint issues

Our GHA for Awesome Lint throws some issues that I'd like us to fix or ignore. The goal is for it to be a passing "green" check to close this issue.

Some thoughts

• First two are valid and have their own issues. Maybe we can ignore them completely near top of file, for now.
• Some of the double-link are fine in those cases. Maybe we can ignore inline?
• What's the deal with the invalid link URLs?
• Need to troubleshoot what a valid ToC is

Output

README.md:[9](https://github.com/BretFisher/awesome-swarm/actions/runs/4206659805/jobs/7300433704#step:3:10):36
  ✖    1:1    Missing file contributing.md                             remark-lint:awesome-contributing
  ✖    1:1    Git repository must be at least 30 days old              remark-lint:awesome-git-repo-age
  ✖    1:1    Missing or invalid Table of Contents                     remark-lint:awesome-toc
  ✖    9:36   https://www.bretfisher.com                               remark-lint:double-link
  ✖   11:50   https://github.com/BretFisher/awesome-swarm/issues/2     remark-lint:double-link
  ✖   11:1[10](https://github.com/BretFisher/awesome-swarm/actions/runs/4206659805/jobs/7300433704#step:3:11)  CONTRIBUTING.md                                          remark-lint:double-link
  ✖   [11](https://github.com/BretFisher/awesome-swarm/actions/runs/4206659805/jobs/7300433704#step:3:12):189  https://github.com/BretFisher/awesome-swarm/discussions  remark-lint:double-link
  ✖   11:275  https://discord.gg/4jPPynEb2e                            remark-lint:double-link
  ✖   13:3    Invalid list item link URL                               remark-lint:awesome-list-item
  ✖   14:3    Invalid list item link URL                               remark-lint:awesome-list-item
  ✖   15:3    Invalid list item link URL                               remark-lint:awesome-list-item
  ✖   16:3    Invalid list item link URL                               remark-lint:awesome-list-item
  ✖   17:5    Invalid list item link URL                               remark-lint:awesome-list-item
  ✖   18:5    Invalid list item link URL                               remark-lint:awesome-list-item
  ✖   19:5    Invalid list item link URL                               remark-lint:awesome-list-item
  ✖   20:5    Invalid list item link URL                               remark-lint:awesome-list-item
  ✖   21:5    Invalid list item link URL                               remark-lint:awesome-list-item
  ✖   22:3    Invalid list item link URL                               remark-lint:awesome-list-item
  ✖   23:5    Invalid list item link URL                               remark-lint:awesome-list-item
  ✖   24:5    Invalid list item link URL                               remark-lint:awesome-list-item
  ✖   25:3    Invalid list item link URL                               remark-lint:awesome-list-item
  ✖   26:3    Invalid list item link URL                               remark-lint:awesome-list-item
  ✖   27:3    Invalid list item link URL                               remark-lint:awesome-list-item
  ✖   46:71   https://www.bretfisher.com                               remark-lint:double-link
  ✖   47:69   https://www.portainer.io/                                remark-lint:double-link
  ✖   54:3    https://www.portainer.io/                                remark-lint:double-link
  ✖  [12](https://github.com/BretFisher/awesome-swarm/actions/runs/4206659805/jobs/7300433704#step:3:13)1:37   CONTRIBUTING.md                                          remark-lint:double-link
  ✖  121:93   https://github.com/BretFisher/awesome-swarm/issues/2     remark-lint:double-link
  ✖  121:189  https://github.com/BretFisher/awesome-swarm/discussions  remark-lint:double-link
  ✖  121:275  https://discord.gg/4jPPynEb2e                            remark-lint:double-link

Operating swarm docs

https://containers.goffinet.org/swarm/operatingswarm.html

I stumbled across this one. This seems to have a lot of interesting debugging tips as well.

Compose Examples

Should we add https://github.com/Haxxnet/Compose-Examples ?

This is not specifically for Swarm, but could be helpful to people to get started with a new stack.

Candidates / Projects needing verification before adding

Are they still useful, can someone try the out and validate they are still "awesome"?

• https://github.com/flavioaiello/swarm-router
• https://gitlab.com/n0r1sk/bosnd
• https://github.com/swarmstack/swarmstack
• https://github.com/mavenugo/swarm-exec (useful for running host cmds on nodes, but running an out of date cli)
• https://github.com/gianarb/orbiter
• https://gist.github.com/thaJeztah/83e7469c85bac28ae90b5178a4919301 alternate way to run swarm with macvlan
• moby/moby#41982 - post in recent CSI PR for ppl to find this.
• https://github.com/jcwimer/docker-swarm-autoscaler - Autoscale Docker Swarm services based on cpu utilization.
• https://github.com/swarmlet/swarmlet
• https://github.com/trajano/docker-volume-plugins
• https://github.com/marcelo-ochoa/docker-volume-plugins
• https://github.com/cuigh/swirl
• https://github.com/wetopi/docker-volume-rbd
• https://github.com/linode/docker-volume-linode
• https://github.com/neuroforgede/docker-swarm-proxy
• https://github.com/djmaze/dobs-volume-plugin

Collection of Stacks:

• https://github.com/YouMightNotNeedKubernetes/

Talks:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aghIj6A9dxM

Hacks:

• https://gist.github.com/olljanat/b96ed26583c452118313fc18e4a663c1 - Static IPs in Swarm

Submit this repo to Awesome Lists

After March 15th, Bret should submit this repo to Awesome Lists assuming all requirements are met.

Add maintainers

Get some of the amazing Swarm fans to pitch in and help maintain this repo.

Decide how to handle Cloud Vendor specific plugins/drivers

Description

We should decide how to keep track of cloud vendor specific things, such as Volume drivers. Should they live in their own section?

Background

I was thinking about adding https://github.com/costela/docker-volume-hetzner especially while the CSI support is not ironclad, but this is specific to one cloud vendor - Hetzner.

dockerswarm.rocks is deprecated

I noticed that the dockerswarm.rocks website listed here is deprecated as of december 2023. They say, "Kubernetes simply won" and "it's not sensitive to build a new product using Docker Swarm Mode".[1] Can you recommend an in-depth discussion about whether or not Docker Engine together with Swarm should be used in production on this topic? Or maybe you guys could take a stand?

[1] https://dockerswarm.rocks/swarm-or-kubernetes/

Add Contributing and PR guides

Start with upstream resources:

https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome/blob/main/contributing.md

Decide how to handle subprojects

Description

We should decide on how to handle subprojects of the things we put on this list. Should we only list the main project here, or should we be able to list more subprojects if they are interesting in their own regard?

Background:

We are maintaining swarmsible with some sub projects that build on top of it. One of them is https://github.com/neuroforgede/swarmsible-hetzner which is essentially "one-click-cluster-setup"-tooling for Docker Swarm on Hetzner. Should such projects be in this list or should the respective projects just link to the subprojects?

Fix minor readme issues

• Maintainer @ links aren't working at top of readme. I guess this doesn't work in readme's, only issues?
• We now have contributing tutorial and CoC. We likely need to update the bottom of readme.

Clarify contributions of new content

Maybe in the main README.md or the contributing.md, let's clarify:

Do you have an idea for a Swarm Tip or post to help others? Great, however:

Awesome Lists aren't supposed to have actual content. Like Wikipedia, ALs just reference data from other places, not generating new ideas/content.

So, post something elsewhere, and create a PR here if you think it's Awesome enough to list:

• Anyone can make a well-formed Gist
• Make a post at https://swarmkit.org
• Other ways, make a Mastodon post, DEV, or GitHub Pages post. Anything with a perm URL that some corporate entity will eventually sunset access to or slap a random paywall/login in front of.

P.S. We don't like Medium. It might seem easy to post to, but avoid it. Some of us are so anti-medium we usually won't reference articles there. Stay in control of your content. Random paywalls prevent others from consuming it, and we wouldn't want to recommend content that people think is free, but isn't.

More on "No Medium":

• https://nomedium.dev/
• https://twitter.com/BretFisher/status/1206766086961745920

Space for a "who's using swarm"?

E.g. our project https://coopcloud.tech makes uses of swarm mode.

We have some related docs also https://docs.coopcloud.tech/intro/faq/#why-docker-swarm

Notify link owners they are part of Awesome Swarm

Create a template GH Issue to post in repos to let them know:

• they are listed in our Awesome List
• How to add a badge to their repo
• How they can contact us for updates, discussion, etc.