Windows Containers - Understand Cluster, Nodes, Services And Stacks

Before diving into the container world, it is important to understand the terms that we will hear commonly in container world. They are

• Cluster
• Nodes
• Services
• Stacks

Clusters

Let’s start off with clusters. Clusters are the group of container hosts and all running Docker.

At first, we will start with single host. It could be running a number of different containers.

We can create a number of such hosts and join. Then we call this system as cluster in Docker.

We can create clusters such as production cluster, development cluster, or testing cluster based on our needs.

Nodes

When joining the container in Docker, host is commonly known as Nodes. So we can say each one of the nodes are joined together to create the cluster.

Services

Services are the single images that are run as the container for a specific function.

Services can be used for management processes such as logging, backup or some analysis process, etc.

This type of management process are need to run in each container host/Nodes in the cluster.

Stacks

Stacks are interrelated group of services that share common dependencies. We can orchestrate and scale them together.

Summary

In this article, I tried to explain the common terms we hear when we start learning Containerization.

In my coming articles, I will try to explain how to create and run containers