I have recently started learning docker. However when studying swarm mode I see that containers can be scaled up. What I would like to know is once you scale conatiner in replicated mode will the data within the container be replicated too ? or just fresh containers will be spawned ?
For example lets say I created mysql service initially only with 1 copy. I create and update tables in that mysql container. Later I scale it to 3, will newly spawned containers contain same table data ? Also will the data be continuously be replicated across 3 docker instances ?
A replicated service will use fresh container instances per container. Swarm does not take care about replication of persistent data to be stored in volumes.
Dependening on the volume plugin (e.g. local driver /w remote nfs shares) you are limited to read-write-once or read-write-many. Even if your volume allows read-write-many, the service replicas might not support that, for instance mysql will not work if you point n replicas to the same volume. You can leverage swarm service template variables for instance to point your volumes to different target folders of the same nfs share.
Also with swarm, you will want to have storage that needs to be reachable from all nodes, as a container can die and be re-spawned on a different node. So either you will need to use a remote share based on NFS or CIFS (see example usages nfs cifs), a storage cluster like Ceph or GlusterFS or a cloud native storage like Portworx. While you have to take care of HA for remote share solutions, data replication is build in for storage clusters and cloud native storage.
In case a containerized service itself is cluster/replica aware it is usualy better to not use the swarm replica mechanism - unless all instances can be started with the same set of parameters.