Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the routing mesh, which provides layer-4 routing and load balancing to a Docker Swarm. We then learned how SwarmKit allows us to update services without requiring downtime. Furthermore, we discussed the current limits of SwarmKit in regard to zero-downtime deployments. Then, we showed how to store configuration data in the Swarm, and in the last part of this chapter, we introduced secrets as a means to provide confidential data to services in a highly secure way.

In the next chapter, we will introduce the currently most popular container orchestrator, Kubernetes. We’ll discuss the objects that are used to define and run a distributed, resilient, robust, and highly available application in a Kubernetes cluster. Furthermore, this chapter will familiarize us with MiniKube, a tool that’s used to locally deploy a Kubernetes application, and also demonstrate the integration of Kubernetes with Docker Desktop.