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Comment by lobster_johnson | Hacker News Reader

Disagree. OpenShift and CNCF are arguably exactly that, but Kubernetes itself isn't. It came out of the engineering team at Google, and its technical merit shouldn't be confused with the considerable marketing effort being put behind it.

Docker Swarm is much more deserving of this kind of cynicism -- a weak, badly designed solution forced on users by a company that's realizing their invention has been commoditized and is no longer a platform they control. Swarm was redesigned at one point to work more like Kubernetes because they realized it was a much saner model.

Kubernetes has more complexity, but it does scale down to single-node clusters.

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I disagree. Kubernetes came out of Google, but has exploded in popularity due to its capability (which comes with extreme complexity): it can scale to extreme levels, but wrapping your head around it requires far more time and trouble for your most basic apps. Thus, you see the software consultants race to become the next Kubernetes experts, since choosing to deploy it essentially requires that you have dedicated professionals managing it (as Google does).

Docker Swarm might be incomplete and missing quite a few features, and it won't scale to thousands of nodes with dozens of independent apps, but the use-cases I've seen are far from that. A single engineer can basically get a "good-enough" moderately scaled system going.

If you have Google-scale problems with Google-caliber engineers and SREs backing you, use Kubernetes. Otherwise, using something else (Docker Swarm "just worked" for the cases I've seen) is easier.

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.

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.

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.

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