[rajivm]

I was in the same boat of leaning toward the simplicity of Compose/Swarm/Docker Cloud, and even took a look at Rancher which supports Swarm & their own compose/Cattle scheduler. After spending months trying to get these to work effectively, and battling with their continuous changes & instability -- I eventually gave Kubernetes a shot. There's definitely a greater learning curve to understanding what all the terminology is, but for the basic uses of deploying a set of services, it turns out it's actually not as complicated as it first seems.

My shortcut was using https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/kompose to convert my docker-compose.yml to the equivalent K8S objects. It wasn't as simple as just running it, but it let me see what it would basically take to do the same thing in Kubernetes. It ended up taking just a few days to wrap my head around it all and get it up and running. Probably even easier if you use something like GKE which manages the cluster for you. If you're investing in using containers for the long-haul, I think it's definitely worth the learning overhead.

There are only three key object types you need to understand to start using K8S: Deployments, Pods & Services. Feel free to msg me if you have some questions about getting started.