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Comment by DavidWoof | Hacker News Reader

I've had small-ish docker swarms in production for a couple of years as well, and I really don't understand why it doesn't seem to be popular at all. I feel like I need to move to K8S just because swarm seems to be going away, but I'm really not seeing the technical advantages at all.

If someone could point me to an article explaining why k8s is so much better than swarm, I'd really appreciate it. Are the big advantages only at 100-node scales?

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I'm also constantly surprised at how unpopular docker swarm is given that everyone already uses docker itself. Why do you think swarm is going away though? I love the idea of just using my docker compose file as my deployment config.

I'm not familiar with Docker Swarm, but the Kubernetes API is the major strong point for me (not saying that it's perfect): it has the right abstractions (CronJob, StatefulSet, ..) and is extensible (Custom Resource Definitions). There are many ways to run containerized workloads (ECS, Mesos, Docker Swarm, ..), but the de-facto agreement on the Kubernetes API is a game changer: now we can start building things on top of it :-)

My company tried using Swarm 2-3 years ago and ran into the problem that it didn't actually work. Containers would just go missing from the network. Consequently we switched to Kubernetes. I imagine it does work now but it seems to be too late.

I've recently started using Kompose to autogenerate Helm charts from docker compose files and I've found that pretty satisfactory.

The second version of Swarm (the first version built into the stack) was really unstable. It got a bad reputation very quickly in one area that it could not afford to.

That said, I was at a conference, talking with a CIO of a K8s related company, back during the initial days of that startup ecosystem. I was told off the record that Google and Redhat were offering an "marketing budget" for companies that would come on board the Kubernetes ecosystem. The person rightly stated that K8s was going to roll everyone else because of it.

Can't validate that - it's hearsay, but I definitely think that it was a big factor

"Going away" might be an overstatement, but I don't see much evidence of it being in use. When I search for help on topics, I don't see much beyond the primary docs. There doesn't seem to be much of a community for swarm out there, and now even the desktop versions of docker come with k8s.

Swarm is not going anywhere.

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