Deploy network infrastructure (Swarm)

Deploy your infrastructure

In this step, you create an AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to run your application stack on. Before you continue, make sure you have taken the time to learn the application architecture.

This example uses AWS but the AWS provider is only one example of an infrastructure you can use. You can create the environment design on whatever infrastructure you wish. For example, you could place the application on another public cloud platform such as Azure or DigitalOcean, on premises in your data center, or even in in a test environment on your laptop.

Note: If you are not deploying to AWS, or are not using the CloudFormation template used in the instructions below, make sure your Docker hosts are running a 3.16 or higher kernel. This kernel is required by Docker’s container networking feature.

Overview of the deployment process

To deploy on an AWS infrastructure, you first build a VPC and then apply apply the CloudFormation template prepared for you. The template describes the hosts in the example’s stack. While you could create the entire VPC and all instances via a CloudFormation template, splitting the deployment into two steps lets you use the CloudFormation template to build the stack on an existing VPCs.

The diagram below shows the VPC infrastructure required to run the CloudFormation template.

The configuration is a single VPC with a single public subnet. The VPC deployment relies on a cloudformation.json template which specifies in the us-west-1 Region (N. California) or us-west-2 (Oregon). The ability to create instances one of these regions is required for this particular CloudFormation template to work. If you want to use a different region, edit the template before the import step.

The VPC network address space is 192.168.0.0/16 and single 24-bit public subnet is carved out as 192.168.33.0/24. The subnet must be configured with a default route to the internet via the VPC’s internet gateway. All six EC2 instances are deployed into this public subnet.

Once the VPC is created, you deploy the EC2 instances using the CloudFormation template located in the docker/swarm-microservice-demo-v1 repository.

Prerequisites

You’ll need to have an Amazon AWS account. This account can be personal or through a corporate instance. The account must be able to deploy EC2 instances in the us-west-1 region (N. California).

Before starting through this procedure, make sure you have an existing EC2 key pair in the us-west-1 region and that you have download its .pem file. If you aren’t sure, login into AWS. Then, follow the AWS documentation to ensure you have the key pair and have downloaded the .pem file.

Git clone the example application’s GitHub repo to your local machine. If you prefer, you can instead download a zip file and unzip the code in your local environment.

Step 1. Build and configure the VPC

This step shows you using the VPC wizard on Amazon. If you prefer to build the VPC manually, configure your VPC with the following values:

To build the VPC, with the wizard.

1. Go to the VPC dashboard.

2. Choose Start VPC Wizard.

3. Make sure VPC with a Single Public Subnet is selected.

   

4. Click Select.

   The browser displays the Step 2: VPC with a Single Public Subnet dialog.

5. Complete the dialog as follows:

   

6. Click Create VPC.

   AWS works to build the VPC and then presents you with the VPC Successfully Created page.

7. Click OK.

8. Choose Subnets from the VPC Dashboard menu.

9. Locate your publicSwarm subnet.

10. Choose Subnet Actions > Modify Auto-Assign Public IP.

    

11. Select Enable auto-assign Public IP and click Save.

In the next step, you configure the remaining AWS settings by using a CloudFormation template.

Step 2. Build the network stack

In this step, you use CloudFormation template to build a stack on AWS. Before you begin, make sure you have the prerequisites:

• access to a private key pair associated with your AWS account.
• a clone or download of the the example code on your local machine.

Then, do the following:

1. Go to the AWS console and choose CloudFormation.

   

2. Click Create Stack.

3. Under Choose a template click the Choose file button.

4. Browse to the download sample code and choose the the swarm-microservice-demo-v1/AWS/cloudformation.json CloudFormation template.

   

5. Click Next.

   The system pre-populates most of the Specify Details dialog from the template.

6. Name the stack VotingAppStack.

   You can name the stack something else if you want just make sure it is meaningful.

7. Select your key pair from the KeyName dropdown.

8. Select the publicSwarm for the Subnetid dropdown menu.

9. Select swarm-scale from the Vpcid dropdown menu.

10. Click Next twice to reach the Review page.

11. Check the values.

    The Template URL,SubnetId and VpcId are always unique, so yours will not match, but otherwise you should see the following:

    

12. Click Create.

    AWS displays the progress of your stack being created

    

Step 3. Check your deployment

When completed, the CloudFormation populates your VPC with six EC2 instances.

Navigate to the EC2 dashboard to view them running.

The underlying AWS infrastructure has this configuration.

All instances are based on the ami-56f59e36 AMI. This is an Ubuntu 14.04 image with a 3.13 kernel and 1.10.2 version of the Docker Engine installed. Each Engine daemon was pre-configured via the /etc/default/docker file using the following DOCKER_OPTS values.

--cluster-store=consul://192.168.33.11:8500 --cluster-advertise=eth0:2375 -H=tcp://0.0.0.0:2375 -H=unix:///var/run/docker.sock

Next step

At this point your infrastructure stack is created successfully. You are ready to progress to the next step and build the Swarm cluster.