Managing Secrets and Configurations with Docker Swarm

So far in this chapter, we have observed Docker Swarm's proficiency at orchestrating our services and applications. It also provides functionality to allow us to define configurations within our environment and then use these values. Why do we need this functionality, though?

Firstly, the way we have been storing details such as our secrets has not been very secure, especially when we are typing them in plain text in our docker-compose.yml file or including them as part of our built Docker image. For our secrets, Swarm allows us to store encrypted values that are then used by our services.

Secondly, by using these features, we can start to move away from setting up configurations in our Dockerfile. This means we can create and build our application as a container image. Then, we can run our application on any environment, be it a development system on a laptop or a test environment. We can also run the application on...