I also assumed the new easy swarm would be easier, but the Multi-host network only works with the newly introduced service command only, it does not work with regular docker run command, which is disappointing because you still neeed a third party key-value store for it, but not for docker service. It literally took me hours to realize that was missing. I think 1.12 was just rushed to show it in DockerCon, normally major releases were mostly bug-free and worked as intended.