Deciding between Kubernetes or Docker Swarm

feminalpanda, 2 months ago

Homeland: portainer Work: Openshift

My thoughts is how granular you need permissions to be.

preciouspupp, 11 months ago

I thought Swarm is long dead.

johntash, 11 months ago

I'm not really sure what the state of docker swarm is, but I'd recommend taking a look at Hashicorp Nomad too. It's between swarm and k8s in complexity, but it's been great to work with so far.

Kunernetes is what I see most companies using, but it's also usually overly complicated for what they need.

What kind of workloads do you plan on running?

rs5th, 11 months ago

I haven’t used Docker Swarm (I have barely used Docker Compose), but I have run a couple on-prem Kubernetes clusters (at my house and for clients at my day job) and cloud Kubernetes clusters, so I can speak to how complex it is it set up and run.

My background is systems administration, engineering, IT, and now DevOps. I’ve been using Linux since Ubuntu 6.06.

I set up my Kubernetes cluster with kubeadm because I wanted to learn, and it took me about a weekend to get my single master, two worker cluster up and running. I think you could probably do this using k3s much faster and have less learning curve (you don’t have to care as much about Container Network Interfaces, for example, because k3s makes that decision for you.)

There is a lot of documentation out there on Kubernetes. Helm as a “package manager” (really a templating engine) can be nice if the software you want to deploy has a Helm chart that is well written. Writing your own Helm charts can be a learning process, I’ve modified some but not written one from scratch yet.

Kubernetes releases new versions about quarterly. I’ve done several upgrades on my primary home cluster over the course of the past 2 years and they’ve been pretty smooth, about an hour of time investment total each. And remember, I’m on the more nerdy and complex flavor of Kubernetes. I think with k3s these would be even smoother and quicker.

I feel like Kubernetes knowledge is probably more valuable out in the industry if that’s a factor for you. I haven’t come across any Docker Swarm clusters in my DevOps travels, just Kubernetes and some HashiCorp Nomad.

I’m curious to see what folks say about Docker Swarm. If you have any questions about Kubernetes or running your workload on it, I’d be happy to try to help!

bananess, 11 months ago

Thanks for the reply!

I also have a background as Linux Sysadmin but barely a couple of years.

I have managed to get a Kubernets cluster up and running but I have difficult setting up containers. The Classic “whoami” works flawless by Traefik for example, but doing the same for Portainer seems like impossibile for me right now, going crazy :D

I’m i choosing a difficult path? Is it possibile to have a good K8s cluster running nice without traefik?

Thanks!

rs5th, 11 months ago

I use ingress-ngnix for all my ingress controllers, I’ve only messed with Traefik a bit in Kubernetes and it felt like it was fighting me the whole time.

bananess, 11 months ago

Nice to know that I’m not the only one having this experience