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Comment by tra3 | Hacker News Reader

I’m still trying to decide on an orechestrator for my deployments. Any reason swarm wouldn’t work instead of k8s?

Docker is pretty much abandoning Swarm though, so wouldn't recommend that at least.

https://www.bretfisher.com/is-swarm-dead-answered-by-a-docke...

That's a post from early 2018. As far as I know they continue to support and maintain swarm. To be fair though, I haven't been following it closely. I need to dive into docker clusters, but I still haven't picked the tech (k8s? swarm? flynn?)

What's a good replacement for Swarm that isn't as complex as Kubernetes? I like the platform abstraction and flexibility of k8s, it's just really heavy for many of my use cases.

I'd checkout HashiCorp's Nomad: https://nomadproject.io/

What are your core use cases? And would you imagine growing into more complex use cases that Kubernetes makes sense for?

I'd advise learning the basics of Kubernetes anyway. Managed offerings like GKE take away all of the operational burden so you can just deploy your app with minimal setup, usually just 1 or a handful of YAML files.

I hear good things about Hashicorp Nomad from people who've used it: https://nomadproject.io/

Especially if you're already using Consul, it should fit the bill perfectly.

> Docker is pretty much abandoning Swarm though, so wouldn't recommend that at least.

> https://www.bretfisher.com/is-swarm-dead-answered-by-a-docke....

The post you link specifically says swarm is not dead, in like the first sentence of the post: "No. Swarm is not dead."

It also says: "This was written early 2018. See my update to this video including Docker Inc. interview in late 2018, and then at DockerCon 2019 Docker again confirmed new features and commitment to Swarm. Most of their customers prefer it."

It's effectively dead based on usage. Just about every modern project uses Kubernetes for container orchestration while Swarm (and others like Cattle, DC/OS, etc) have decreased in popularity.

Here's a commitment from Docker's new overlords to support swarm for the next 2 years: https://www.mirantis.com/blog/mirantis-will-continue-to-supp...

Support doesn't mean usage. Kubernetes is where the community is, not Swarm.

Swarm is basically dead. I’ve spent over 2 weeks trying to get kubernetes to work and have completely failed. Left another comment about that.

I’ve been looking and haven’t found any alternatives. Really feels like there should be.

Honestly don’t know why this is being downvoted. Swarm is officially being deprecated by Docker. There aren’t any current alternatives to k8s being proposed.

I second this. Even if swarm isn't officially deprecated my time with had proven that swarm was abandoned for k8s around 2016/2018. Long standing issues have been around for years.

Even trivial things like deploying only a single service from a stack file that contains multiple services isn't possible (even though docker compose has no problems with it).

The current recommended method to restart a service is to set it's scale to 0 then back to whatever number it was previously (because you remember it right?)

I thought it would be as good/polished as docker compose but boy was I wrong.

How about flynn [0] and nomad [1]? Both have been described as easier alternatives to k8s. There's also k3s [2] that caught my attention.

[0]: http://flynn.io [1]: https://www.nomadproject.io [2]: http://k3s.io

Thank you so much I'll check those out!

We are moving from swarm to k3s.

if i were you, i would watch k3s closely. it's super promising; i may not want to dpeloy anything production critical there.

Why is that? I thought it was a verified distribution?

it's certified yes. but for me, community is a crucial point and i think it's not big enough yet. maybe that's just me.

I think it has one of the best communities. And especially the Rancher team are extremely responsive on twitter

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