[KronisLV]

> And it's managed.

Can’t use cloud stuff on-prem and also if your clients have a server room of their own. Same for homelab.

Also it’s nice not to shift the pets attitude from servers to clusters and instead treat everything as cattle - provided you have backups of persistent data and the config versioned in a Git repo and there’s maybe some Ansible in the mix, being able to recreate an environment in the case of a fuckup is nice and also helps against bit rot.

Disclaimer: I actually prefer Docker Swarm/Compose over K8s due to simplicity (which matches my deployments and scale), but in the cases where I had to use a variety of K8s, going for K3s was pretty okay.

[debarshri]

If you peel off all the layers in Docker Swarm and K8s, technically it has the same level of complexity. In k8s there are a lot of concepts. I would argue you have the same network, storage, and compute complexities as an operator.

[hdjrudni]

> treat everything as cattle

The cluster isn't that hard to recreate if things go south. Everything is in YAML configs already. And since I'm managed, it's just a few clicks in DigitalOcean to create a new cluster. And actually, I think I can create clusters through their CLI too, so if I did want to automate it, it's already ready to go. So I'd say I'm cattle-ready, but too cheap to pay for more cattle.

I nearly went Docker Compose/Swarm by accident when I was just getting started. I knew I wanted to dockerize my app but then couldn't figure out how to get it into prod. Then I found out people don't actually use Docker Compose for prod it seems and eventually stumbled into Kubernetes. It took a few weeks to wrap my head around, but I'm happy with it now.

Once you have a nice set up, I'd say it's pretty simple to maintain. DevSpace is fantastic for development, and then for deployment I just wrote a little script which builds my images, updates the kustomize with new images and applies the manifests. Pretty simple.

[aejm]

Glad to hear you prefer Docker Swarm/Compose, I feel it’s a solid tool for when you need some of the more complex multi server deployments, and helps you avoid all the costs and complexities around K8s. Plus, running docker compose in development and docker swarm in production feels like the closest you can get to having your development environment match your production environment.

[hdjrudni]

> Plus, running docker compose in development and docker swarm in production feels like the closest you can get to having your development environment match your production environment.

I run Minikube in Podman for dev. And then I use kustomize to customize dev, staging and prod environments. The environments are 99% the same, they just have different env vars and memory limits.