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I tried using k8s for a personal projects cluster a while back and found it very frustrating to use in a whole bunch of ways, whether managed or not. I ended up

I tried using k8s for a personal projects cluster a while back and found it very frustrating to use in a whole bunch of ways, whether managed or not. I ended up just using straight docker swarm and it works fine for that level of need, especially combined with something like portainer. Much simpler and easy to understand what's going on. Obviously it's not a very useful solution on its own beyond a certain scaling point but it probably meets most small use case needs. But it doesn't get brought up as an option very often because docker basically FUDed themselves by having two things called swarm and then loudly killing the older one making everyone think it no longer exists.

piaste 4y ago
+1 for Swarm. It's not for hyperscalers and it's got a limited feature set compared to k8s, but it's simple enough that you can really learn how it works and how to make it do what you want even if it's only a small part of your job. If you just want redundant services, zero-downtime upgrades, and either manual-only scaling or very restricted autoscaling, Swarm is likely sufficient. Main downside? Not available as a managed service, at least from major providers. Then again, if you're OK with managed services, you would probably prefer either a fully-managed PaaS (Heroku, Azure Web Apps, etc.) or a managed k8s.
- bigjoes 4y ago
  This is kinda the mental-cage I am in right now: For some small amount of containers (300 at most, almost all webserver-like), I would like to have some basic high availability and scheduling on a few nodes. K8S, K3S and even Nomad feels overkill, I tried all of them. Swarm on the other hand is so easy so setup and get running, its seems like the perfect solution. The only thing stopping me is the stigma of Swarm being dead, which is not even the case right now (there is still support but no new features / communication). I feel like starting with swarm right now would be perfectly fine but using a technology which likely may be declared official dead in about 1-2 years, just some how feels wrong. This is my own mental-cage-issue here, right?
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    This is what I mean about how they FUDed themselves. There is a thing called swarm that isn't supported anymore but there's no reason to think the newer thing called swarm is gonna go away, and the only way I think it matters if it gets new "features" is if docker as a whole does. If it started collecting new features unique to swarm it'd just become another k8s.
    - bigjoes 4y ago
      This is my first time hearing about swarm and swarm ? I always thought they killed it and brought it back zombie-style soon after. How can I distinguish between them? Like is there any way to make sure I use the new one? Is there documentation? Now you made me question reality :D
      - stormbrew 4y ago
        This SO thread covers it I think https://stackoverflow.com/a/40045865 https://stackoverflow.com/a/40045865 The messaging around this was terrible, but it's basically that a separate product got killed and they made it a core feature with the same name at the same time.

piaste 4y ago

+1 for Swarm. It's not for hyperscalers and it's got a limited feature set compared to k8s, but it's simple enough that you can really learn how it works and how to make it do what you want even if it's only a small part of your job. If you just want redundant services, zero-downtime upgrades, and either manual-only scaling or very restricted autoscaling, Swarm is likely sufficient. Main downside? Not available as a managed service, at least from major providers. Then again, if you're OK with managed services, you would probably prefer either a fully-managed PaaS (Heroku, Azure Web Apps, etc.) or a managed k8s.

bigjoes 4y ago
This is kinda the mental-cage I am in right now: For some small amount of containers (300 at most, almost all webserver-like), I would like to have some basic high availability and scheduling on a few nodes. K8S, K3S and even Nomad feels overkill, I tried all of them. Swarm on the other hand is so easy so setup and get running, its seems like the perfect solution. The only thing stopping me is the stigma of Swarm being dead, which is not even the case right now (there is still support but no new features / communication). I feel like starting with swarm right now would be perfectly fine but using a technology which likely may be declared official dead in about 1-2 years, just some how feels wrong. This is my own mental-cage-issue here, right?
- stormbrew 4y ago
  This is what I mean about how they FUDed themselves. There is a thing called swarm that isn't supported anymore but there's no reason to think the newer thing called swarm is gonna go away, and the only way I think it matters if it gets new "features" is if docker as a whole does. If it started collecting new features unique to swarm it'd just become another k8s.
  - bigjoes 4y ago
    This is my first time hearing about swarm and swarm ? I always thought they killed it and brought it back zombie-style soon after. How can I distinguish between them? Like is there any way to make sure I use the new one? Is there documentation? Now you made me question reality :D
    - stormbrew 4y ago
      This SO thread covers it I think https://stackoverflow.com/a/40045865 https://stackoverflow.com/a/40045865 The messaging around this was terrible, but it's basically that a separate product got killed and they made it a core feature with the same name at the same time.