Set up high availability

Docker Universal Control Plane is designed for high availability (HA).

When setting up a UCP cluster, you can add additional nodes to serve as replicas of the controller. In that case, you’ll have multiple nodes, each running the same set of containers. Learn more about the UCP architecture.

Adding replica nodes to your cluster allows you to:

• Handle controller node failures,
• Load-balance user requests across the controller and replica nodes.

Size your deployment

To make the cluster tolerant to more failures, add additional replica nodes to your cluster:

When sizing your cluster, follow these rules of thumb:

• Don’t create a cluster with just one replica. Your cluster can’t tolerate any failures, and it’s possible that you experience performance degradation.
• When a replica fails, the number of failures tolerated by your cluster decreases. Don’t leave that replica offline for long.
• Adding too many replicas to the cluster might also lead to performance degradation, as changes to configurations need to be replicated across all replicas.

Replicating CAs

When configuring UCP for high-availability, you need to ensure the CAs running on each UCP controller node are interchangeable. This is done by transferring root certificates and keys for the CAs to each controller node on the cluster. Learn how to replicate CAs for high availability

Load-balancing on UCP

Docker UCP does not include a load-balancer. You can configure your own load-balancer to balance user requests across all controller replicas. Learn more about the UCP reference architecture.

Since Docker UCP uses mutual TLS, make sure you configure your load balancer to:

• Load-balance TCP traffic on ports 80 and 443,
• Use a TCP load balancer that doesn’t terminate HTTPS connections,
• Use the /_ping endpoint on each UCP controller, to check if the controller is healthy and if it should remain on the load balancing pool or not.

Where to go next

• UCP architecture
• Install UCP for production