First we need to enable Swarm Mode and create a dedicated network for our RethinkDB cluster:

# initialize swarm
docker swarm init

# create RethinkDB overlay network
docker network create –driver overlay rdb-net

We start building our RethinkDB cluster by running a single RethinkDB server, we will remove this instance later on:

# create and start rethinkdb primary
docker service create –name rdb-primary –network rdb-net –replicas 1 rethinkdb:latest rethinkdb –bind all –no-http-admin

Now we can create a secondary RethinkDB node that will join the rdb-primary node and form a cluster:

# create and start rethinkdb secondary
docker service create –name rdb-secondary –network rdb-net –replicas 1 rethinkdb:latest rethinkdb –bind all –no-http-admin –join rdb-primary

Scale the secondary node so we can have a minimum of 3 nodes needed for RethinkDB automatic fail-over mechanism:

# up 3 nodes (primary + two secondary) to enable automatic failover
docker service scale rdb-secondary=2

We now have a functional RethinkDB cluster, but we are not done yet.
Because we

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