Do you mind if I ask why you chose Docker Swarm? I don't know that much about Swarm and I'd love to know what you think about it compared to K8s (in terms of ease, nice things, things missing, etc.)
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.
The main reason probably was the fact that I was already familiar with Docker and Docker Compose. Kubernetes introduces a whole lot of concepts that I didn't feel like studying up, plus there was a 3-node minimum requirement. I just wanted to be able to start with a single node and be able to scale up if needed, so Swarm just felt like a natural match here.
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).
I'll look into it, thank you so much! Way back then there wasn't a lot of choice though. I think I've played with Minikube but that was not recommended for production, and all the other distributions were huge (or at least I thought so!).
There isn't actually ( nor was there ever ) a 3 node requirement for k8s.
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 might be misremembering it, huh! Yeah, it's pretty much the same as Swarm then (any odd number of manager nodes is valid, and if more than a half go down you only lose the management ability and everything else stays up).
Not too bad, except I have no idea how many users we have :')
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.