In a setting where you are deploying to production a simple app on a single host, what are the benefits and drawbacks of these three options: simply use docker compose, like in development create a network with --driver=bridge, --scope=swarm and use swarm mode via docker stack deploy use docker st…

If you have a single host, use docker compose, don’t make life complicated. If you have (or plan for) multiple hosts, then use Docker Swarm with Overlay and docker stack deploy. Note that docker stack deploy does not offer all the features, some like privileged or device are missing.

Docker compose does not offer features like automatic shutdown of unhealthy containers though.

That’s true. You have restart: always, but no health check which kicks in when the container does not exit or crash.

Comparing between bridge network and overlay network, for docker stack deploy. With bridge we: lose the ability to perform DNS lookup using tasks.${service name} lose the ability to send requests to ${stack name}_${service name} When we use overlay network we can send requests to ${stack name}_${…

Check Swarm with dnsrr ( doc ): If you configure a service to use DNS round-robin (DNSRR) service discovery, there is not a single virtual IP. Instead, Docker sets up DNS entries for the service such that a DNS query for the service name returns a list of IP addresses, and the client connects direct…

I don’t think DNSRR is supported in bridge network, even if we set the scope to swarm.

Single host deployment: docker compose vs docker stack deploy (bridge driver, swarm scope) vs docker stack deploy (overlay driver)

Docker Engine Swarm

meyay (Metin Y.) November 27, 2024, 4:30pm 8

You might find this post about swarm template placeholders useful: Example usage of docker swarm template placeholders. They can be in hostnames as well.

Topic		Replies	Views
When to use Docker-Compose and when to use Docker-Swarm General	13	71500	August 26, 2019
Create swarm and overlay network with docker-compose Compose docker , swarm	2	13092	May 19, 2017
Is there any better way of deploying Docker Compose stack/services other than Swarm in scenario where autoscaling/load balancing isn't required? General swarm , docker-compose	1	537	June 15, 2023
Docker stack deploy do not use networks Swarm swarm , docker-compose	1	299	July 20, 2024
Compose and Swarm do not work together General	3	3814	November 22, 2016

Single host deployment: docker compose vs docker stack deploy (bridge driver, swarm scope) vs docker stack deploy (overlay driver)

Related topics