Creating and managing a Swarm

Let's now take a look at using Swarm and how we can perform the following tasks:

• Creating a cluster
• Joining workers
• Listing nodes
• Managing a cluster

Creating the cluster hosts

Let's start by creating a cluster of three machines. Since we are going to be creating a multi-node cluster on our local machine, we are going to use Multipass, which we covered in Chapter 6, Docker Machine, Vagrant, and Multipass, to launch the hosts by running the following commands:

$ multipass launch -n node1
$ multipass launch -n node2
$ multipass launch -n node3

This should give us three nodes; you can check this by just running the following command:

$ multipass list

You should see something similar to the following output:

Figure 8.3 – Launching the nodes using Multipass

You may remember from when we last used Multipass that bringing up a host doesn't mean that Docker is installed...