Docker Swarm vs. Kubernetes : A Detailed Comparison

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Shorter version.

Docker Swarm: dead. Kubernetes: not dead.

That's what is said to my boss but he told me stfu budget.

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I don’t need another article to know this

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Docker doesn't even believe in Swarm anymore.

Or to put it another way: how the fuck is that tricky?

I tried several times to experiment with Docker swarm but nearly all the tools are deprecated (Docker machine) so I gave up & learned Kubernetes

Same. I love swarm too but the market had decided kubernetes and everything died. Nail in the coffin was when mirantis bought it.

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Has anyone tried hashicorp nomad? I heard about it, glanced through docs a bit, but never installed it myself. For some sizes of infra k8s is just an overkill and running containers manually (e.g. ansible+systemd) is just plain wrong, no migration for example, no easy machine replacement. Would nomad fit?

My take on docker swarm is that its only benefit over K8s is that its simpler for users, especially if users already have experience with only with docker. However K8s offers features and extensibility that allow more complex system setups, which is often a necessity.

Also with the industry moving away from docker shim, I think its safe to say docker swarm is dead. Relying on it will only further lock in to the docker ecosystem

if your boss like to do comparison, do it between k8s and Nomad/Consul/Vault ...

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Swarm use continues in the industry, no idea how/why as its completely unsupported, under maintained, and pretty much feature frozen. Still, lots of people electing to use it on brand new projects.

If it was me as the CIO, i would be deeply concerned, as no money in the world can get you support if you are neck deep in doodoo at 3am.. just no vendor to help, and no assurances of any bug getting fixed.

Sure, swarm for messing about, and low criticality systems, but anything of any importance, come on now.

If you cant handle Kube, then use Nomad. Or even simpler, AWS ECS (or ECSanywhere).

Just my 2c and as a closest swarm lover (reformed).

I've been working as a field engineer for Harness.io in CI/CD space since 2018. We focused early on containers and cloud native. I've been in thousands of customer conversations. The only time I hear about Swarm is in the past tense. WebSphere, Mainframe, and Mesos come up more frequently. 😉

Deciding whether to go with Swarm or Kubernetes is not "tricky."