(though it is a pretty brief stream of consciousness)
Either that or Hashicorp Nomad, because it is also a pretty nice solution and seems to overall have a brighter future than Swarm does, even if the HCL which it uses is a little bit weird and needs porting over from Docker Compose files.
Admittedly, in the last year, i've also seen Kubernetes be tolerable for on-prem deployments in the form of K3s, which is a lovely project and wastes way less memory and CPU for smaller clusters: https://k3s.io/
I know that many out there won't necessarily have to or won't want to run it on-prem and instead will just run whatever Kubernetes solution will be offered to them by their cloud vendor, which is also a valid point, but not one that i have to deal with.
Instead, i often find myself with a VM that has about 8 GB of RAM and needs to run everything from the actual cluster, to PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis, a few Java apps and who knows what else inside of a development environment, because clearly that was possible without containers so also should be possible with them. There, running something like Rancher or even a K8s cluster that's made from scratch (or initialized with kubeadm or whatever) would be insanity. And having a shared cluster for the whole company might also necessitate people to just manage it, which isn't in the cards.
Also, in my personal hybrid cloud (homelab + cloud VPSes), running Kubernetes would be comparatively expensive and wasteful, since Docker Swarm still has a lower overhead and Swarm provides me with most of the functionality that i might want, oftentimes in the form of regular containers, e.g. Caddy/Nginx/httpd web server as an ingress with some configuration files.
Actually, anyone who has ever tried to get the K3s Traefik ingress working with a custom wildcard certificate will probably understand why i might actually prefer to do that, since in K3s you'll need the following for such a setup to work:
- a ConfigMap for Traefik, knowledge about the structure of the ConfigMap (tls.stores.default.defaultCertificate)
- a TLSSecret for storing the actual certificate/key
- a TLSStore (which i also needed to actually use the secret, spec.defaultCertificate.secretName)
- a HelmChartConfig for Traefik to load the ConfigMap with the mounted secrets and config
Versus just reading a page for a web server that i want to run and dropping some values in a config file.