Playing around with Docker Swarm mode really makes fun: you only need a single command to initialize a cluster on your local machine. The following line configures your Docker Engine as Docker Swarm manager: docker swarm init The command output already tells you how to add additional worker nodes and looks similar to this: docker swarm join \ --token SWMTKN-1-somecharacters-andmorecharacters \ 192.168.47.11:2377 You don’t necessarily have to add additional worker nodes, because the manager node can also be used as worker.

The Docker InfraKit is a tool to create and manage you infrastructure in a declarative and self-healing manner. InfraKit itself more or less only consists of plugins, communicating via unix domain sockets. There are different types of plugins, namely group, instance, and flavour, each with a focus on different layers of infrastructure management. Instance plugins are no surprise here: they manage your physical resources. Whether a physical resource is actually some machine or only a virtual concept, is an implementation detail of the instance plugin.

You have heard about Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment, don’t you? Apart from abstract definitions we showed you how one can perform deployments with the help of Gradle, Ansible, and Docker. A quite complete example project has been published at GitHub. Most deployment pipelines contain the steps in the figure below. The order of creating deployables and performing tests doesn’t really matter, both steps might even be performed asynchronously.

Deploying products to production is a quite individual process for every application. Building deployment pipelines has already been described on a high level of abstraction, e.g. by the ThoughtWorks guys Jez Humble, Dan North and Chris Read in their paper The Deployment Production Line, not to forget the more general theme about Continuous Delivery being described in its own book by Jez Humble and David Farley. You might search for tools implementing the according patterns, and you’ll find some like ThoughtWorks Go (it’s free!

Probably a bit late, but private life is more important :) You can find the slides of my talk for the Gradle Summit 2014 online at http://gesellix.github.io/gradle-summit-2014/. The video ist available at YouTube along with the other Gradle Summit videos. In case you’re interested in details regarding our implementation of a deployment pipeline using Gradle and Docker (2nd part of the Gradle Summit talk), please follow this blog or my employer’s IT blog.

Great news: I’m going to speak at the Gradle Summit 2014 in Santa Clara. This will be the very first talk I’ll give in public so I’m quite excited! My talk will have two parts, with the first one about how we migrated a Maven multi-module project of 300 pom.xml files to Gradle. The second part will show you how we currently use Gradle in combination with Docker to continuously deploy a product of the EUROPACE 2 platform to production.