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Overview

Welcome!

let a = "b";

$a = "B"

What It Does

... (image: "docker service create" + "docker service update" + JSON = docker service deploy) ...

Docker Service Deploy is a simple abstraction layer over the docker service create and docker service update commands. Furthermore, it adds a declarative JSON format to describe the service to be deployed.

The whole thing comes as a command line tool and as a .Net library.

An Alternative To Docker Stack

It's all quite similar (and heavily inspired by) Docker Stacks, and indeed, the tooling is set up to be relatively easy to migrate from- and to.

Reasons for creating Docker Service Deploy (CAUTION: Opinions incoming):

Conceptual differences, prone to personal preferences:

  • Only a single service per deployment item
  • No new conceptual layer ("stacks") on top of services
  • Environments (development, production, etc.) are built-in and (can be) part of the service spec
  • Declarative service format as JSON instead of YAML

Features that Docker Stack is missing (at the time of writing):

  • Doesn't support binding to the local "nat" network on Windows hosts ("host" ports won't work)
  • When deploying "ingress" ports, containers cannot be accessed from the localhost
  • No "attached" way of deploying, which means that during deployment, there is no way to wait for the deployment to complete (either successfully or otherwise)
  • Stacks seem to only exist as a concept in the docker-cli, which means they are kinda hard to manage using the Engine API
  • As a result of the previous points, there is no way to use the declarative Docker Compose format to deploy a Stack through the Engine API