Just diving into Docker, and I'm already a bit confused... There's a docker stack (or swarm) that allows me to define containers (services?) and their networking... but then there's also docker compose, which does the same thing? Even the yaml config specs are similar.
Docker is a tool that includes a daemon that runs in the background and a client app that communicates with the daemon. The daemon runs a packaged-up program and its dependencies ("image") as basically a chroot environment using an overlay filesystem and isolated network, in a custom cgroup and namespace (basically, process space/virtual filesystem paths different from your normal user process space/filesystem).
Swarm is a (sadly) soon-to-be-abandoned way to spin up a cluster of multiple hosts with Docker daemons; don't waste your time on it. The comparable solutions are AWS ECS or [to a lesser extent] HashiCorp Nomad.
Docker Compose is a console app that takes a config file and starts multiple Docker containers, creates volumes, and configures Docker networks - on a single Docker instance, so it's only really useful for testing stuff locally that requires multiple containers running at once.
Swarm is an orchestrator while compose is designed to describe services to be run on a single machine.
Basically, you may want to use swarm (or k8s or anything else) in order to orchestrate your containers across a multi-machine cluster and compose when defining a set of services running on a single host.
Yes, it focuses a lot on shared resources, but the negative space defined by where resources are not shared certainly informs any human-defined networking topology. I'm not so sure a tool couldn't make a pretty good stab at doing the same thing.
it essentially the whole thing evolved as follows:
- docker - it is just a packaging mechanism for your app and a deployment unit if you use Kubernetes, ECS or similar
- docker-compose - if you have an app that spreads over multiple docker containers (i.e. you're doing micro services) it allows you to spin all of them with a single command allowing these components to be interconnected. It is essentially your local testing environment.
- swarm - as far as I know it is a dead project, it supposed to compete with Kubernetes and similar, but it failed
