Automating host deployment

There are many ways to automate the deployment of Docker hosts. The specifics, as always, depend on the orchestration system. For example, adding new hosts to a Docker Swarm cluster running on Amazon EC2 is as easy as running something like the following:

$ docker-machine create --driver amazonec2
$ docker swarm join --token ABC... manager

For Azure or GCE, it would be the same. Simply replace the driver and pass the appropriate driver specific flags to docker-machine.

This section will look at a couple of different tools that can be used to manage the hosts for a Docker cluster. The first is Terraform which works with just about everything. Next is Docker's own cloud management tool, Docker Cloud. Finally, it will introduce two tools which are in public beta, Docker for AWS and Docker for Azure.

Note

If you plan on running on AWS, GCE, or Azure, consider using the container hosting services that each of them offers. With each service, the tasks of creating and...