I tried it briefly for homelab use and came to the same conclusion— I ended up feeling like I had a lot more of a safety net with a conventional Ubuntu/Docker/Portainer type setup than I did with Rancher.
Yup. I should have specified that mine was a homelab setup as well (and was several years ago).
It’s a shame because I still feel there’s a gap between docker-compose and Kubernetes. I don’t have k8-size problems, but I do have well-beyond-docker-compose-size problems.
I can vouch for Nomad, coupled with Consul and Vault. You can start simple, it scales well and with the recent and undergoing integrations with Consul Connect and Nomad you can go service mesh with mTLS if you want.
Docker Swarm fills that gap pretty well in my experience. The best part is that it's an almost trivial migration to move from Compose to Swarm. Swarm to K8s is not so easy, even with tools like kompose.
It’s a shame because I still feel there’s a gap between docker-compose and Kubernetes. I don’t have k8-size problems, but I do have well-beyond-docker-compose-size problems.