Setup swarm mode cluster, with managers and worker nodes I have used GCP for creating compute engines as we get 300$ free credit. You can follow steps in https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/quickstart-linux to get started with the creation of vm's. Make sure that you select f1.micro instances to be in the free tier limit. More details on GCP free tier: https://cloud.google.com/free/ . However you can spin instance either in GCP, Azure or Aws to get started quickly. Once after creation on VM, install docker using yum install docker -y ( I have used CentOS distribution). We will start by creating a Docker swarm cluster with one master node and one working node. Docker swarm comes by default with docker installation and doesn't require any additional installations. Execute the command docker swarm init to initialize docker swarm in the manager node. We get a swarm token to run on the node and also for adding another manager Adding a worker node to the swarm cluster