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Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

> Why not just ...

Podman comes with the ability to directly run Kubernetes YAML files, so the aforementioned non-standard addon things become unnecessary.

Ever tried getting a team of 100+ engineers to agree between minikube vs docker-compose? It's not fun and produces nothing interesting. Thankfullyy, with Podman such discussions are no longer needed.

Docker should've implemented this about 4-5 years ago, if they wanted to make their product The Best. Instead they became hostile to cool new product ideas, stopped on the ease of use front, and went all-in with Docker Desktop, which is just another non-standard kludge.

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To be fair they were fighting for docker swarm which ended up losing, so it's not surprising that they're on the back foot.

Currently still using Docker Swarm, i wish it was more popular, because it's oftentimes the logical next step when moving from running Docker containers manually or Docker Compose locally. It is pretty simple to use (especially with Portainer), not as resource intensive as most Kubernetes distros and the Compose format now matches what you'd run locally (with extra options, e.g. on which host to run things) vs the spammy format of Kubernetes manifests or even Helm charts.

I actually wrote more about it on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/docker-swarm-over-kubernete...

Though it's essentially inevitable that Swarm will be abandoned some day, so being able to migrate over to either Hashicorp Nomad or some Kubernetes distro is probably paramount, which is when tools like Kompose come in, when that's finally necessary. The problem of what cluster to run on still remains for all of the folks who are stuck with on-prem deployments, since most orgs can't pay for a team to manage a cluster or for bunches of hardware resources to run the full Kubernetes.

In that regard, the best option that i've found so far is either K3s with Portainer, or K3s with Rancher (RKE and probably RKE2 will still be somewhat heavyweight).

Agreed. I never really got hooked on Docker itself, but Swarm is well-scoped and easy to use without sacrificing too much; I'd argue the vast majority of k8s users would be better off with something simpler, and Swarm fits the bill nicely. Maybe Nomad does too, but IMO Hashicorp do a really bad job of documenting the progression from a localhost test to a production setup; the docs for each of their tools can be summarised as "draw the rest of the fucking owl".

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