When to use Docker-Compose and when to use Docker-Swarm

It will probably help to start with a few definitions:

docker-compose: Command used to configure and manage a group of related containers. It is a frontend to the same api's used by the docker cli, so you can reproduce it's behavior with commands like docker run.

docker-compose.yml: Definition file for a group of containers, used by docker-compose and now also by swarm mode.

swarm mode: Used to manage a group of docker engines as a single entity and provide orchestration (constantly trying to correct any differences between the current state and the target state).

service: One or more containers for the same image and configuration within swarm, multiple containers provide scalability.

stack: One or more services within a swarm, these may be defined using a DAB or a docker-compose.yml file.

bridge network: Network managed by a single docker engine where multiple containers may communicate with each other. You may have multiple networks managed by an engine, and containers can be attached to zero or more networks.

overlay network: Similar to a bridge network but spanning multiple docker engines. These require a key/value store to maintain their state. Swarm mode provides this, but if swarm mode is disabled, you may also use etcd, consul, or zookeeper.

links: a method to connect containers together that predates the bridged network. Its usage is no longer recommended.

classic swarm: A predecessor to the integrated swarm mode that runs as a container, allows multiple engines to appear as one, but does not provide orchestration or include its own k/v store.

To answer the questions:

has docker-swarm succeeded docker-compose and overlay networks is the new (recommended) way to connect containers? Or is it that docker-compose is still an integral part of the entire docker family and it is expected and advisable to use it to connect containers to work in collaboration. If so does docker-compose work with containers across different nodes in the swarm??

They provide different functionality and will continue to both serve a purpose. docker-compose cannot start containers inside swarm mode, but a newer version of the docker-compose.yml file (version 3) can be used to define a stack directly in swarm mode without using docker-compose itself. docker-compose is needed to manage containers outside of swarm mode, on a single docker engine or with classic swarm.

Or is it that overlay networks is for connecting containers across different hosts in the swarm and docker-compose is for creating internal links?? Besides I also see that it is mentioned in the docker documentation that --links not recommended anymore and will be obsolete soon.

docker-compose starting with version 2 of the yml file connects multiple containers together by default with a new bridged network per project (the project defaults to the directory name). With classic swarm, that would default to an overlay network using an external k/v store. And with a swarm mode stack, this would be an overlay network.

Using docker networks is the preferred way to have containers communicate with each other. You want a network per group of containers you wish to isolate from the rest of your docker environment. docker-compose automates this network creation, but you can also do it from the command line with docker networks create.

Linking have been largely replaced by docker networks with built-in DNS discovery. When you remove links from your docker-compose.yml, you may need to replace them with a depends_on section to enforce container startup order. Otherwise, there are very few scenarios where linking makes sense and all the usage I've seen is from someone following outdated documentation.

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compose or swarm or swarm overlay networks

You would find that you need to use all of the above if you're doing anything other than a demo on your laptop etc.

I deliberately separated out swarm & swarm overlay networks, because you need not use both, but you cannot get an overlay network without having a swarm underneath it.

Compose is for bringing up multiple containers together. Now it makes sense that they are related to each other, although they may not be. But let's suppose a typical case when the containers are for services that are related to each other, then you would want them to talk to each other in some way, but yet control how they talk to each other using networks. For example, take a 3 tier app that has a webserver, appserver and db. Let's say all three components are dockerized and you are using compose to bring them up togetherm instead of running docker run.. three times with different parameters etc. All three would come up, but you would want to control how they connect to each other. You want the webserver to be able to talk to the appserver, but not to the db directly. And you would want the appserver to talk (ping) the db server container and also ping the web server. All connections are two way, but restricted to only those services that you want to be able to communicate with each other. For such an arrangement, you would typically setup 2 networks - say frontend and backend. The web and app containers are connected to the frontend network. The app and db containers are connected to the backend network. Because there is no common network between the db and web containers they cannot touch (ping) each other, which is your intent.

Now, if you want these 3 services to be able to run on your cluster of 100's of machines, and you also want to scale across them, you would need a network that spans multiple hosts. That is where overlay networking (in swarm) comes into picture. Overlay networking is nothing but multi-host networking build over VxLAN technology. You do not have to know about VxLAN, except that it is a standard network topology that is supported in almost all modern networking infrastructure.

I hope that clarifies.

Edit: I did not see that you got an answer already!

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I think you have most of the understanding correct as to what each is, but some tweaking is required.

You're correct docker-compose is to bring up multi-container applications. Earlier you used to do docker run .. to start every container. Usually modern applications embracing the micro-services paradigm can be made up of dozens of services and using docker run .. will get very tiresome very soon. Hence docker-compose allows you to express all the containers and their properties and how they connect to each other as a yaml or json file so you can manage it in an easier fashion.

So, docker-compose is the container orchestration part in the docker ecosystem.

Links are different, they are just a part of docker-compose or docker run commands and are deprecated in favor of software defined networks of which overlay networks are just one of them.

Swarm is the scheduling component in docker. What is scheduling - it is nothing but figuring out where to "place" your containers in your cluster of docker hosts. You can have a cluster of hundreds of servers, and you may have hundreds of containers, each encapsulating a service for a dozen different applications. Now how should these containers be distributed across your cluster of hundreds of servers, should some containers be placed only on certain hosts because they satisfy a particular criteria or maybe they should be closer to (or not) other containers which are somehow related... all these are part of the scheduling component which is performed by docker Swarm.

I suggest you go through the getting started documentation on docker.com here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/getstarted-voting-app/

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