If you only have a few VMs, consider ditching swarm and just using docker (with compose) with host mode networking. I’m not sure swarm ever got stable enough to

If you only have a few VMs, consider ditching swarm and just using docker (with compose) with host mode networking. I’m not sure swarm ever got stable enough to use in prod; I migrated our stuff from swarm to k8s a couple years ago due to similar issues. K8s has been solid but it’s a beast. For storage, why not just mount host dirs into the container for stuff you want to persist? Then you’re no worse off than you were before.