[Draiken]

If you can use docker swarm you can use Kubernetes. At that point k8s is just plain better.

The core of Kubernetes is super simple and all the hard parts are hidden away on actually setting up and maintaining kubernetes the hard way on bare metal machines. Odds are, if you're doing that, you have the resources to take some time to dive deeper into how it works.

I've done multiple single engineer Kubernetes setups that are working on production today. So far I've had only a few problems with it. I know it's not a huge data range, but I'm not the smartest person in the world (or a true infrastructure guy) and still found it easy to work with.

Swarm has always been a rushed afterthought IMO. Although I have way less experience with it than k8s, so I'm biased on this.

[jazoom]

I had heaps of issues with Kubernetes.

I moved to Swarm a year ago and have had a grand total of 0 issues. It can do everything I need.

[sandGorgon]

This is actually not correct and I'm a little surprised at the comment.

The ingress story in kubernetes is bring-your-own and usually people run their clusters behind Google or AWS LB which are supported as ingress in k8s. Running k8s on metal is a super daunting task. Choosing your network plugin is another task and usually you have to install a different system service on each of your nodes - Swarm has this built in.

And lastly the Compose file format. 10 lines of Swarm compose file literally translate into multiple dozens of separate k8s yml file. Creating this in k8s is super complex in itself.

Swarm is really pretty nice for someone setting up a few dozen nodes and services.