[gaius]

Genuine question - what makes you think that Kubernetes has won?

Well, "won" in quotes. I am not a k8s fanboy or anything, I simply observe that all the major cloud providers are offering managed k8s services that have superseded their own proprietary container-type offerings. For better or worse that's where the momentum is. If you wanted to containerize your stack right now, k8s then pick one of the big 3, seems like a safe bet.

[imiric]

I've noticed the same trend, and as a fan of Docker Swarm, along with this news, I'm not happy about it.

Compared to Kubernetes, Swarm is a breeze to setup, deploy and manage. The manifest files are the same Docker Compose files we're used to, just expanded to cover the new stack concepts. It has support for remote storage mounting, advanced networking configuration, various interesting volume and network plugins[0], and is generally a pain-free experience to use (from my admittedly short time with both).

Kubernetes is a fine product. It's just a shame Swarm doesn't seem to have the same traction.

Can someone share their Swarm experience in production, possibly compared to k8s?

[0]: https://docs.docker.com/engine/extend/legacy_plugins/

[sz4kerto]

We're going with Swarm exactly because of the reasons you've listed. The EE part is a bit flaky sometimes (I'm looking at you, UCP), but Swarm is brilliant.

[sandGorgon]

I agree - but I'm now very afraid. I'm beginning to wonder if its not better to just swallow the pain and just go k8s.

I would love it (and pay for it) if Swarm says that it is a opinionated distro (ingress/overlay) + management layer on top of k8s.

The silence is deafening and not nice.

[sz4kerto]

I don't think that you need to be afraid and migrate just because of that. Swarm is not a service, so if they stopped developing it then you'd have plenty of time figuring out how to move away because your Swarm clusters would not stop working.

Also, there are very large Swarm installations in production at large companies, so I'd be surprised if Docker cancelled the product (which is their flagship).

[GordonS]

Do you know if there are any good tools for migrating your manifest/compose yaml files to k8s, especially using more recent features such as configs and secrets?

[smarterclayton]

There is kompose with a k: https://github.com/kubernetes/kompose

[GordonS]

Doesn't seem to support some of the more recent features, such as secrets and configs :(

[y4mi]

> Well, "won" in quotes. I am not a k8s fanboy or anything, I simply observe that all the major cloud providers are offering managed k8s services that have superseded their own proprietary container-type offerings. For better or worse that's where the momentum is. If you wanted to containerize your stack right now, k8s then pick one of the big 3, seems like a safe bet.

kubernetes got released more than a year earlier. And it wasn't until 2016 that people actually started to take docker-swarm seriously. Thats a two year headstart...

docker-swarm would've needed several really impactful feature to offset that. It didn't really. The only real upsite is how easy it is to install and maintain. But that's hardly important with pretty cheap hosted solutions around (at least cheap in comparison to hiring several SRE to maintain the cluster).

But thats just my opinion as a user.

[gaius]

The only real upsite is how easy it is to install and maintain. But that's hardly important with pretty cheap hosted solutions around (at least cheap in comparison to hiring several SRE to maintain the cluster)

Indeed - something like AKS can get you up and running very quickly, whereas as recently as 6 months ago unless you had a k8s wizard-guru on staff, there was no point in even trying to go it alone, esp. not into Production.

It also suggests that the skill set of the on-prem k8s expert will decline in demand over time, there will be less demand for people who can set it up from scratch on bare metal. We shall see!

[pacala]

GKE has been around for years.