the docker stack deploy command does automatic diffing of which services have changed. So your deploys are automatically optimized. This is generally the philos

the docker stack deploy command does automatic diffing of which services have changed. So your deploys are automatically optimized. This is generally the philosophy of Swarm vs kubernetes - everything is built in. You can argue this is less powerful, but in general it works brilliantly. In so far as separating out the different "applications", you simply put them on a separate overlay network (encrypted if you want). Also, if you are dead-set on making them entirely separate, every separate "application" is a separate "Stack". So you can stack deploy them separately. If I had to do what you just told me - single nginx proxying to two different "applications" - i would do this. 1. stack 1 - application 1 + network 1 2. stack 2 - application 2 + network 1 3. stack 3 - nginx + network 1 now you can deploy any of them independently. You can make this even more sophisticated by having each stack on a different overlay network (encrypted as well). And nginx bridging between them. Not sure why you are facing problem with the official tutorial - btw, a manager is a worker ;) I have a fairly large dev swarms on a single node.