Question

Is it possible to create a docker swarm cluster using nodes on different cloud providers?

Let's say some of them on AWS, some on GCE and some on Azure?

Answer 1

if your nodes could access each other, then you will be able to create a swarm cluster. It doesn't matter who are your cloud providers or where your node located.

Assume you already have a controller node with swarm and a discovery service (such as consul or etcd) both installed, the you can add a compute node like this:

$ docker run -d swarm join --advertise=<node_ip>:2375 consul://<consul_ip>:8500

Where node_ip and consul_ip should be your controller node's IP.

So the tricky part is, can you make your nodes communicate to each other? Actually this question is not easy to answer. You need to care about IP allocation, network design, routers etc.