Visualizing Containers

Swarm’s orchestrator schedules containers (or more strictly, tasks to run containers) on whichever nodes it sees fit. That means we don’t know where a container for service will end up running.

Visualizer

For educational purposes, we are going to use a new “visualizer” tool that provides a web interface for seeing the nodes in our clusters, and the containers running on them. Docker provides a handy image for this. You wouldn’t typically run the visualizer in production, but it will give us a feel for how containers are scheduled across the cluster.

Modifying Stack file

Let’s add a visualizer service to our docker-stack.yml file: