// the take
A companion repo to a 2018 DockerCon talk that walks through building a full Docker Swarm cluster from scratch: reverse proxy, persistent storage, centralized logging, monitoring, and a GUI, stitched together as a pile of separate stack files you deploy one at a time. It's for someone learning how the pieces of a real Swarm deployment fit together, not for anyone running Swarm in production today.
Each concern (proxy, storage, logging, monitoring, pruning) is its own stack file you deploy independently, so you can study one piece at a time instead of untangling a single giant compose file. The advanced Traefik example demonstrates real operational tricks: a global-mode service that bind-mounts the host Docker socket to install a storage driver on every node as it joins, and a socat redirect so Traefik can run on worker nodes while still reaching the manager API over TCP. It covers the full 'day 2' stack that most tutorials skip entirely, ELK for logs, Prometheus/swarmprom for metrics, Portainer for a GUI, REX-Ray for volumes, rather than just the happy-path app deployment.
Docker Swarm lost the orchestration war years ago; Docker's own tooling and the broader ecosystem moved to Kubernetes, so none of these patterns carry over to what people actually operate now. The repo hasn't been touched since January 2023 and depends on components that are effectively abandoned, REX-Ray has had no meaningful maintenance in years, and the EE/UCP sections reference Docker Enterprise features that no longer exist in that form, so following the steps today means hitting broken installs. There's no CI validating that any of these stacks still deploy against a current Docker Engine, so you're trusting several-years-old YAML and shell scripts to still work. Secrets handling is demo-grade, tokens passed through shell env vars and piped into docker secret create, which is fine for a walkthrough but not something to lift into a real deployment.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →