Are Kubernetes & Swarm mandatory?

I’m back using Docker after several years away. Of course some things have changed. The installation guide seems to imply that you have to install Kubernetes and Swarm. Can I get away without them? My only reason for installing Docker is just to get an instance of the Discourse forum app up and running. I don’t really need orchestration features.

You dont have to use them. You can get by with starting containers from images on certain ports and then using those machine:port instances in an external load balancer like nginx or F5. We do that in some lower envs like INT, QA, TEST, etc

Swarm does give the ability to have some load balancing built in but you still use the ports. If you use a front end load balancer like nginx you could manage the ports internal to the swarm as well. Scaling is much simpler with swarm. YOu can scale with a simple cli command like docker service scale servicename=.

Its probably recommended to use swarm, mesos or kubernetes in a production environment for sure.

thats my opinion

Thanks for the reply. I should have mentioned, that I’m only wanting it running on my laptop. Will Docker’s Mac Desktop software still function OK if I don’t install Kubernetes and/or Swarm do you think? My MacBook Air really don’t have the grunt to power much.

Sure if you are just trying to setup docker and have an app running in a container in a test kind of scenario or non critical scenario then yes it cant run in Mac’s docker desktop.

OK thanks, I’ll give it a go.