In general, I really love the idea of running all your stuff on a server you own as opposed to e.g. Heroku or AWS. Simple predictable monthly bill really gives you peace of mind.
Have you found hosting you like with bandwidth expense caps? I'm looking for something like this but I don't want surprise network bills if I misconfigure something.
Not exactly what you're looking for, but solves the same problem in a different way:
I've been quite happy with using Hetzner's dedicated servers which come with 1 GBit unmetered connection (unlimited bandwidth), so no surprise network charges :)
Would love to be shown a counterexample provider.
You are very unlikely to replicate this running any type of personal infrastructure. Or anything that's not specifically this.
aws will just charge you regardless.
My concern around Swarm is around the Docker corporation, which appears to be struggling.
As a competitor, we have Nomad, but with the recent IBM acquisition, I'm concerned about Nomad's future.
For Lunni, my plan is to add support for another orchestrator while keeping the developer experience of just working with docker-compose.yml. I really didn't want to do K8s, but given it's essentially an open standard now, it should be a safer bet than Nomad. I guess we'll see when I can get to it!
Nomad was always much better than k8s, sad that it never got the same kind of traction or mindshare.
I'm looking into K8s and other orchestrators like Nomad and perhaps will add support in Lunni at some point, but for now I believe Swarm is the sweet spot for smaller deployments (from single server up to maybe a couple hundred nodes).
Swarm still works pretty smoothly for me, although I'm worried about the Mirantis situation, too. I'm currently working on a new backend, which will also enable us to plug in other orchestrators if need arises.
Etcd requires 3 boxes for HA, but nothing stops you running a single node etcd.
I personally run single master clusters, because if the master goes down, you lose management as opposed to actual service availability, so mostly I don't care.
Now that there's anything wrong with your preference.
I'm a swarm user, but using single node swarms. It's the best solution I found for deploying apps. A lot of projects publish docker compose files, and those are easily usable with Swarm after some small modifications. I'm using the setup described at dockerswarm.rocks [1] and it's smooth sailing.
It's a real pitty, and still surprises me, Swarm is not more popular. It's still maintained [2] but few people still recommend it (even dockerswarm.rocks doesn't anymore). I've switched to it in 2022 [2] thinking I didn't take a lot of risk as starting with it is a really a low investment, and I'm still satisfied with it. I've deployed a new server with it recently.
1: https://dockerswarm.rocks/traefik/ 2: https://www.yvesdennels.com/posts/docker-swarm-in-2022/