Docker Swarm VS Portainer

Docker Documentation

When I sought help, a senior engineer simply asked, “Did you deploy it using Docker?” That’s when it hit me: I had missed a critical step. Determined to fix my mistake, I cleaned up the server, removed all dependencies and tools installed initially, and started fresh. This time, I focused on learning Docker.

The official Docker documentation is your comprehensive guide to all things Docker. While it might seem obvious, it's worth highlighting that this is one of the best-maintained technical documentations out there.

Docker Docs

Docker Docs: https://docs.docker.com/

Docker installed on your machine (Install Docker).

We will talk about downloading and getting to run Docker in our next session, but for now feel free to explore their resources on their website!🥰

Docker Documentation

I don't recommend using docker.io today as it will install an older version (at the time of writing this post, it is 24.0.7 on Ubuntu 22.04) and most of the tutorials will show you features based the official version and the official documentation.

I'm running this setup on a mini pc running Intel N100(4core, 6w TDP) with 16G ram using portainer to setup the relevant containers. You can directly do this via docker as well.

We see that both of our containers are working and no restarting issues. So all looks good at first glance. Now we can move to the next step. We could now deploy NTFY container, but I would like to deploy a Portainer. Why?

It's crucial to have an effective access management system that allows you to robustly manage user identities and permissions across your clusters. Although Kubernetes includes an advanced RBAC implementation, this only works within a single cluster. A dedicated Kubernetes management platform such as Rancher or Portainer is required to cohesively configure identities and grant users the multi-cluster access they require.

Check it out https://www.portainer.io/

Portainer is a container management platform that provides a powerful web interface to administer your workloads. It natively supports Kubernetes environments to help you manage your Pods, Deployments, Helm charts, and other cluster resources. Portainer also provides robust RBAC capabilities and an external authentication layer, letting you grant team members access to Kubernetes through Portainer without directly exposing your cluster.

This episode is actually why I started this series in the first place. I am an active Docker user and Docker fan, but I like containers and DevOps topics in general. I am a moderator on the official Docker forums and I see that people often struggle with the installation process of Docker CE or Docker Desktop. Docker Desktop starts a virtual machine, and the GUI is to manage the Docker CE inside the virtual machine even on Linux. Even though I prefer not to use a GUI for creating containers, I admit it can be useful in some situations, but you always need to be ready to use the command line where all the commands are available. In this episode I will use Ansible to install Docker CE in the previously created virtual machine, and I will also install a web-based graphical interface, Portainer.

Portainer

> Any tips on the minimum hardware or VPS's needed to get a small swarm cluster setup?

From my testing, Docker Swarm is very lightweight, uses less memory than both Hashicorp Nomad and lightweight Kubernetes distros (like K3s). Most of the resource requirements will depend on what containers you actually want to run on the nodes.

You might build a cluster from a bunch of Raspberry Pis, some old OptiPlex boxes or laptops, or whatever you have laying around and it's mostly going to be okay. On a practical level, anything with 1-2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM will be okay for running any actually useful software, like a web server/reverse proxy, some databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB), as well as either something for a back end or some pre-packaged software, like Nextcloud.

So, even 5$/month VPSes are more than suitable, even from some of the more cheap hosts like Hetzner or Contabo (though the latter has a bad rep for limited/no support).

That said, you might also want to look at something like Portainer for a nice web based UI, for administering the cluster more easily, it really helps with discoverability and also gives you redeploy web hooks, to make CI easier: https://www.portainer.io/ (works for both Docker Swarm as well as Kubernetes, except the Kubernetes ingress control was a little bit clunky with Traefik instead of Nginx)

In this section, we will add Portainer to help us in managing our Docker containers. You can find more details about it here. To integrate Portainer into our EC2 project, we can follow these steps: