Deploy Your First Node

This page describes how to create your first node on Docker Cloud.

After you link your Docker Cloud account with your hosts (either your own hosts or one or more cloud providers), the next step is to launch your first node.

When launching a node you’ll actually be creating node clusters. Node clusters are groups of nodes of the same type and from the same cloud provider, and they allow you to scale the infrastructure by provisioning more nodes with a drag of a slider.

To start, go to the Nodes tab and click Launch new node.

Enter the information for each node:

Node cluster name: name for the node cluster. Can contain alphanumeric characters, dashes and underscores.
Deploy tags: (optional) more information about deployment tags can be found here.
Provider: the cloud provider or host to use (if you have configured more than one).
Region: the region on which to provision the node cluster.
Type/size: the type and size of the nodes in the cluster.
Number of nodes: the number of nodes to create in the node cluster. This can be modified later.
Disk size: the disk size for each node.

Note: The available regions, node types and sizes, and disk size options available in this dialog depend on which providers you are using. For example, DigitalOcean nodes have a fixed disk size depending on the type and size of the node you choose.

Click Launch node cluster to provision this node cluster. It may take several minutes for the cluster to launch. To follow along with the live status, click Timeline, then click Node Cluster Deploy to view the console.

Once the node cluster is deployed, you’ll see a Success! message near the top of the page.

From the Node view you can see the status of your nodes, destroy individual nodes or the whole cluster, and scale your node cluster from 1 to 10 nodes. You can also click an individual Hostname to see which containers are running on it.

What’s next?

Now that you’ve got at least one node deployed, it’s time to deploy your first service.

Remember that a service is a group of containers from the same container image. Services make it simple to scale your application across a number of nodes. They can also be linked one to another even if they are deployed on different nodes, regions, or even on different cloud providers.

Continue the tutorial and deploy your first service.