[honeybadger223]

Eh....kind of. There's several problems with Swarm in production, even at a small scale. I've ran into issues with nodes refusing workloads, inability to attach to the cluster, Docker failing to start, etc. Also since it's so sparingly used, I have to dig into the depths of Google to try to remediate the issue if I can't figure it out on my own.

Making Swarm production ready is also a time sink. Most people end up with a bunch of bash scripts mashing together YAML for secrets, deployments, etc.

Personally I think it's a waste of developer time. Most people don't need the features of Swarm or K8S. Just use a VM at a popular IaaS provider and stick a LB in front of it. Then you don't have to ask questions about IP rate limiting, or other gotchas. If you outgrow a couple of VMs, we can talk about throwing ASGs or containers at the problem. Honestly though most people I talk to don't need containerized solutions.

[tracker1]

You can absolutely start simpler, with even a single docker host and something like dokku. Then it's a matter of a git push for deploys.