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I’d recommend giving Docker Swarm + Traefik a shot. It’s dead simple to set up manually and has very little “magic” in how things work under the hood. Plus much

I’d recommend giving Docker Swarm + Traefik a shot. It’s dead simple to set up manually and has very little “magic” in how things work under the hood. Plus much of your existing Docker Compose config will work out of the box. It vastly simplified the deployment process too. I previously avoided Docker Swarm for ages since I assumed it involved the same level of complexity as k8s. I also initially figured that managed k8s would be a safer bet than managing my own Swarm cluster, but if you’ve used anybody’s managed k8s (or read https://k8s.af https://k8s.af), you’ll realize that every cloud provider has their own closed source fork of k8s with plenty of nasty bugs that you can’t do anything about.

fy20 6y ago
I use Swarm at home (only on a single node, because it turns out 3 are overkill for my needs) and it's been running great for 6 months so far. Before that I tried various incarnations of k8s and eventually they'd just destroy themselves up and require a rebuild (the main issue was persistent storage). My only complaint with Swarm is there isn't an easy way to expose containers directly on the network (like host networking). I have a few containers (wireguard and minidlna) which need this, so those are running through docker-compose. I've tried macvlan but wasn't able to get that working in Swarm mode.
- lub 6y ago
  Did you try this? networks: - host https://docs.docker.com/network/host/ https://docs.docker.com/network/host/
  - fy20 6y ago
    Maybe it has changed since I built it, but I wasn't able to get this working with Swarm services. I had to convert them to docker-compose to make it work. The docs suggest it should work with Swarm mode though, so maybe I need to try again. Ideally I'd like to give each service its own IP on the network, which was possible with how I had k8s setup.
- diarrhea 6y ago
  Mind sharing a bit more on your home setup? Asking because I never saw the point in multiple container replicas for simple self-hosted stuff. One container each has served me well so far [0] (Nextcloud, Bitwarden, GitLab), and if they crash, they just get restarted. Multiple containers increase throughput, supporting more users, is that it? It just sounds nightmarish in regards to storage and parallel, conflicting writes. [0]: One container per component (web, db, cache, ...).
  - fy20 6y ago
    I do have just one container of each thing, but I was originally planning to have multiple nodes. I have 3x ThinkCenter Tiny M73 (with the Pentium CPU) and thought one would be a bit underpowered for everything I wanted to run (it was for k8s), so was planning to distribute services automatically across the swarm. One node is more than enough though, so I'd actually be fine with just docker-compose, but splitting everything up into separate 'services' is nice.
sofixa 6y ago
Docker Swarm is pretty much abandonware/on life support at best, so one should avoid using it for new stuff. Hashicorp's Nomad is the best choice on the complexity for features scale IMHO, and that's why i'm writing an article how great it is, how easier some things are and what's missing compared to Kubernetes.
- KronisLV 6y ago
  And yet, Docker Compose is pretty popular for local development, so much so, that it's not uncommon to find a docker-compose.yml in the repositories for many open source projects. And Docker Swarm builds on that, by bridging the gap between Docker Compose and multi-server deployments, with tools like Swarmpit and Podman for easier management of it as well, much like Rancher does for Kubernetes. I agree that Docker Swarm isn't developed as actively as it should be, but disagree that it should be avoided and disagree that it should be allowed to die. In my opinion, it's a more minimalistic and more sane approach to container orchestration with minimal up front investment (just install Docker and edit your Compose files a bit with deploy constraints, you're ready to go). Hashicorp's Nomad is good if you have a strong engineering department or need to run mixed workloads (e.g. both containers and native processes) because its abstractions are well suited for this, but HCL, their DSL for describing deployments, doesn't map nicely to neither Docker, nor Docker Compose files, knowledgebases or tutorials. Nomad's integration with Consul is a major boon, but the need to run your own CA for safe communication between nodes, Nomad's read-only Web UI, and the oddity of HCL at times also makes it a non starter for me and some other people. At the end of the day, these are just two data points, sadly the job market for Kubernetes also dwarfs everything else and sadly many companies will be burned by this and will learn nothing at the end of the day. Ideally, i think that the best route would be evaluating the orchestrators and other technologies that you want to use by doing pilot projects and such, and looking at them in real world circumstances, to determine their fit for your goals and needs (Web UIs will matter for some, but not for others, for example; as will onboarding and the need for long term investment vs plug and play). Edit: as for Kubernetes, personally i find the K3s distribution to be an almost reasonable alternative to Swarm/Nomad, if the situation calls for it: https://k3s.io/ https://k3s.io/ Edit #2: it would actually be pretty awesome to read more about your experience in this article that you're writing!

fy20 6y ago

I use Swarm at home (only on a single node, because it turns out 3 are overkill for my needs) and it's been running great for 6 months so far. Before that I tried various incarnations of k8s and eventually they'd just destroy themselves up and require a rebuild (the main issue was persistent storage). My only complaint with Swarm is there isn't an easy way to expose containers directly on the network (like host networking). I have a few containers (wireguard and minidlna) which need this, so those are running through docker-compose. I've tried macvlan but wasn't able to get that working in Swarm mode.

lub 6y ago
Did you try this? networks: - host https://docs.docker.com/network/host/ https://docs.docker.com/network/host/
- fy20 6y ago
  Maybe it has changed since I built it, but I wasn't able to get this working with Swarm services. I had to convert them to docker-compose to make it work. The docs suggest it should work with Swarm mode though, so maybe I need to try again. Ideally I'd like to give each service its own IP on the network, which was possible with how I had k8s setup.
diarrhea 6y ago
Mind sharing a bit more on your home setup? Asking because I never saw the point in multiple container replicas for simple self-hosted stuff. One container each has served me well so far [0] (Nextcloud, Bitwarden, GitLab), and if they crash, they just get restarted. Multiple containers increase throughput, supporting more users, is that it? It just sounds nightmarish in regards to storage and parallel, conflicting writes. [0]: One container per component (web, db, cache, ...).
- fy20 6y ago
  I do have just one container of each thing, but I was originally planning to have multiple nodes. I have 3x ThinkCenter Tiny M73 (with the Pentium CPU) and thought one would be a bit underpowered for everything I wanted to run (it was for k8s), so was planning to distribute services automatically across the swarm. One node is more than enough though, so I'd actually be fine with just docker-compose, but splitting everything up into separate 'services' is nice.

sofixa 6y ago

Docker Swarm is pretty much abandonware/on life support at best, so one should avoid using it for new stuff. Hashicorp's Nomad is the best choice on the complexity for features scale IMHO, and that's why i'm writing an article how great it is, how easier some things are and what's missing compared to Kubernetes.

KronisLV 6y ago
And yet, Docker Compose is pretty popular for local development, so much so, that it's not uncommon to find a docker-compose.yml in the repositories for many open source projects. And Docker Swarm builds on that, by bridging the gap between Docker Compose and multi-server deployments, with tools like Swarmpit and Podman for easier management of it as well, much like Rancher does for Kubernetes. I agree that Docker Swarm isn't developed as actively as it should be, but disagree that it should be avoided and disagree that it should be allowed to die. In my opinion, it's a more minimalistic and more sane approach to container orchestration with minimal up front investment (just install Docker and edit your Compose files a bit with deploy constraints, you're ready to go). Hashicorp's Nomad is good if you have a strong engineering department or need to run mixed workloads (e.g. both containers and native processes) because its abstractions are well suited for this, but HCL, their DSL for describing deployments, doesn't map nicely to neither Docker, nor Docker Compose files, knowledgebases or tutorials. Nomad's integration with Consul is a major boon, but the need to run your own CA for safe communication between nodes, Nomad's read-only Web UI, and the oddity of HCL at times also makes it a non starter for me and some other people. At the end of the day, these are just two data points, sadly the job market for Kubernetes also dwarfs everything else and sadly many companies will be burned by this and will learn nothing at the end of the day. Ideally, i think that the best route would be evaluating the orchestrators and other technologies that you want to use by doing pilot projects and such, and looking at them in real world circumstances, to determine their fit for your goals and needs (Web UIs will matter for some, but not for others, for example; as will onboarding and the need for long term investment vs plug and play). Edit: as for Kubernetes, personally i find the K3s distribution to be an almost reasonable alternative to Swarm/Nomad, if the situation calls for it: https://k3s.io/ https://k3s.io/ Edit #2: it would actually be pretty awesome to read more about your experience in this article that you're writing!