Decentralizing Docker: How to Use Serf with Docker

The author clearly means to have one nginx container in front of a bunch of wordpress containers, which can be hosted on a number of different machines, if needed.

The problem he's trying to solve is how to hook all the bricks together, e.g. how to let the nginx component know that there is a new backend (wordpress component) running and where.

This problem is orthogonal to the way you deploy the component, whether as classical applications running on a bare machine, a VM, or a lightweight container.

The advantage of using docker is that the exact same configuration can be used in a wide range of set-ups ... well assuming you can run docker :-p