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Administer and maintain a swarm of Docker Engines
When you run a swarm of Docker Engines, manager nodes are the key components for managing the swarm and storing the swarm state. It is important to understand some key features of manager nodes in order to properly deploy and maintain the swarm.
This article covers the following swarm administration tasks:
- Using a static IP for manager node advertise address
- Adding manager nodes for fault tolerance
- Distributing manager nodes
- Running manager-only nodes
- Backing up the swarm state
- Monitoring the swarm health
- Troubleshooting a manager node
- Forcefully removing a node
- Recovering from disaster
Refer to How nodes work for a brief overview of Docker Swarm mode and the difference between manager and worker nodes.
Operating manager nodes in a swarm
Swarm manager nodes use the Raft Consensus Algorithm to manage the swarm state. You only need to understand some general concepts of Raft in order to manage a swarm.
There is no limit on the number of manager nodes. The decision about how many manager nodes to implement is a trade-off between performance and fault-tolerance. Adding manager nodes to a swarm makes the swarm more fault-tolerant. However, additional manager nodes reduce write performance because more nodes must acknowledge proposals to update the swarm state. This means more network round-trip traffic.
Raft requires a majority of managers, also called a quorum, to agree on proposed updates to the swarm. A quorum of managers must also agree on node additions and removals. Membership operations are subject to the same constraints as state replication.
Use a static IP for manager node advertise address
When initiating a swarm, you have to specify the --advertise-addr flag to
advertise your address to other manager nodes in the swarm. For more
information, see Run Docker Engine in swarm mode. Because manager nodes are
meant to be a stable component of the infrastructure, you should use a fixed
IP address for the advertise address to prevent the swarm from becoming
unstable on machine reboot.
If the whole swarm restarts and every manager node subsequently gets a new IP address, there is no way for any node to contact an existing manager. Therefore the swarm is hung while nodes to contact one another at their old IP addresses.
Dynamic IP addresses are OK for worker nodes.
Add manager nodes for fault tolerance
You should maintain an odd number of managers in the swarm to support manager node failures. Having an odd number of managers ensures that during a network partition, there is a higher chance that a quorum remains available to process requests if the network is partitioned into two sets. Keeping a quorum is not guaranteed if you encounter more than two network partitions.
| Swarm Size | Majority | Fault Tolerance |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2 | 2 | 0 |
| 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 4 | 3 | 1 |
| 5 | 3 | 2 |
| 6 | 4 | 2 |
| 7 | 4 | 3 |
| 8 | 5 | 3 |
| 9 | 5 | 4 |
For example, in a swarm with 5 nodes, if you lose 3 nodes, you don't have a quorum. Therefore you can't add or remove nodes until you recover one of the unavailable manager nodes or recover the swarm with disaster recovery commands. See Recover from disaster.
While it is possible to scale a swarm down to a single manager node, it is
impossible to demote the last manager node. This ensures you maintain access to
the swarm and that the swarm can still process requests. Scaling down to a
single manager is an unsafe operation and is not recommended. If
the last node leaves the swarm unexpetedly during the demote operation, the
swarm will become unavailable until you reboot the node or restart with
--force-new-cluster.
You manage swarm membership with the docker swarm and docker node
subsystems. Refer to Add nodes to a swarm for more information
on how to add worker nodes and promote a worker node to be a manager.
Distribute manager nodes
In addition to maintaining an odd number of manager nodes, pay attention to datacenter topology when placing managers. For optimal fault-tolerance, distribute manager nodes across a minimum of 3 availability-zones to support failures of an entire set of machines or common maintenance scenarios. If you suffer a failure in any of those zones, the swarm should maintain a quorum of manager nodes available to process requests and rebalance workloads.
| Swarm manager nodes | Repartition (on 3 Availability zones) |
|---|---|
| 3 | 1-1-1 |
| 5 | 2-2-1 |
| 7 | 3-2-2 |
| 9 | 3-3-3 |
Run manager-only nodes
By default manager nodes also act as a worker nodes. This means the scheduler can assign tasks to a manager node. For small and non-critical swarms assigning tasks to managers is relatively low-risk as long as you schedule services using resource constraints for cpu and memory.
However, because manager nodes use the Raft consensus algorithm to replicate data in a consistent way, they are sensitive to resource starvation. You should isolate managers in your swarm from processes that might block swarm operations like swarm heartbeat or leader elections.
To avoid interference with manager node operation, you can drain manager nodes to make them unavailable as worker nodes:
docker node update --availability drain <NODE>
When you drain a node, the scheduler reassigns any tasks running on the node to other available worker nodes in the swarm. It also prevents the scheduler from assigning tasks to the node.
Back up the swarm state
Docker manager nodes store the swarm state and manager logs in the following directory:
/var/lib/docker/swarm/raft
Back up the raft data directory often so that you can use it in case of
disaster recovery. Then you can take the raft
directory of one of the manager nodes to restore to a new swarm.
Monitor swarm health
You can monitor the health of manager nodes by querying the docker nodes API
in JSON format through the /nodes HTTP endpoint. Refer to the nodes API documentation
for more information.
From the command line, run docker node inspect <id-node> to query the nodes.
For instance, to query the reachability of the node as a manager:
docker node inspect manager1 --format "{{ .ManagerStatus.Reachability }}"
reachable
To query the status of the node as a worker that accept tasks:
docker node inspect manager1 --format "{{ .Status.State }}"
ready
From those commands, we can see that manager1 is both at the status
reachable as a manager and ready as a worker.
An unreachable health status means that this particular manager node is unreachable
from other manager nodes. In this case you need to take action to restore the unreachable
manager:
- Restart the daemon and see if the manager comes back as reachable.
- Reboot the machine.
- If neither restarting or rebooting work, you should add another manager node or promote a worker to be a manager node. You also need to cleanly remove the failed node entry from the manager set with
docker node demote <NODE>anddocker node rm <id-node>.
Alternatively you can also get an overview of the swarm health from a manager
node with docker node ls:
docker node ls
ID HOSTNAME MEMBERSHIP STATUS AVAILABILITY MANAGER STATUS
1mhtdwhvsgr3c26xxbnzdc3yp node05 Accepted Ready Active
516pacagkqp2xc3fk9t1dhjor node02 Accepted Ready Active Reachable
9ifojw8of78kkusuc4a6c23fx * node01 Accepted Ready Active Leader
ax11wdpwrrb6db3mfjydscgk7 node04 Accepted Ready Active
bb1nrq2cswhtbg4mrsqnlx1ck node03 Accepted Ready Active Reachable
di9wxgz8dtuh9d2hn089ecqkf node06 Accepted Ready Active
Troubleshoot a manager node
You should never restart a manager node by copying the raft directory from another node. The data directory is unique to a node ID. A node can only use a node ID once to join the swarm. The node ID space should be globally unique.
To cleanly re-join a manager node to a cluster:
- To demote the node to a worker, run
docker node demote <NODE>. - To remove the node from the swarm, run
docker node rm <NODE>. - Re-join the node to the swarm with a fresh state using
docker swarm join.
For more information on joining a manager node to a swarm, refer to Join nodes to a swarm.
Force remove a node
In most cases, you should shut down a node before removing it from a swarm with the docker node rm command. If a node becomes unreachable, unresponsive, or compromised you can forcefully remove the node without shutting it down by passing the --force flag. For instance, if node9 becomes compromised:
$ docker node rm node9
Error response from daemon: rpc error: code = 9 desc = node node9 is not down and can't be removed
$ docker node rm --force node9
Node node9 removed from swarm
Before you forcefully remove a manager node, you must first demote it to the worker role. Make sure that you always have an odd number of manager nodes if you demote or remove a manager
Recover from disaster
Swarm is resilient to failures and the swarm can recover from any number of temporary node failures (machine reboots or crash with restart).
In a swarm of N managers, there must be a quorum of manager nodes greater than
50% of the total number of managers (or (N/2)+1) in order for the swarm to
process requests and remain available. This means the swarm can tolerate up to
(N-1)/2 permanent failures beyond which requests involving swarm management
cannot be processed. These types of failures include data corruption or hardware
failures.
Even if you follow the guidelines here, it is possible that you can lose a
quorum of manager nodes. If you can't recover the quorum by conventional
means such as restarting faulty nodes, you can recover the swarm by running
docker swarm init --force-new-cluster on a manager node.
# From the node to recover
docker swarm init --force-new-cluster --advertise-addr node01:2377
The --force-new-cluster flag puts the Docker Engine into swarm mode as a
manager node of a single-node swarm. It discards swarm membership information
that existed before the loss of the quorum but it retains data necessary to the
Swarm such as services, tasks and the list of worker nodes.