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Docker Swarm Cluster Complete Guide

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Re: Docker Swarm Cluster Complete Guide

#21
post #6

I am looking into this now. Basically it’s either this or the super hard Kubernetes right? I find it hard to believe that we don’t have a middle ground?

I don't understand why people think Kubernetes is "hard" - I find it quite straightforward and the documentation is excellent. I've been running my side projects on a single k8s clusters and rarely have issues. Yes, there is a learning curve. It's not a Heroku where you enter one command and it just works. You'll need to spend a few days to become familiar with the basics concepts. And it may take weeks grasp the adv…

Kubernetes is "hard" when you're not running on the cloud. The solutions for persistent storage and networking are a mess when you're running on self-hosted infrastructure.

Re: Docker Swarm Cluster Complete Guide

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people think Kubernetes is "hard" - I find it quite straightforward and the documentation is excellent. I've been running my side projects on a single k8s clusters and rarely have issues. Yes, there is a learning curve. It's not a Heroku where you enter one command and it just works. You'll need to spend a few days to become familiar with the basics concepts. And it may take weeks grasp the adv…

Kubernetes is "hard" when you're not running on the cloud. The solutions for persistent storage and networking are a mess when you're running on self-hosted infrastructure.

Fair enough, I was referring to "using" Kubernetes as opposed to managing your own infrastructure. I can imagine how running it on self-hosted servers outside of a popular cloud provider can be hard.

Re: Docker Swarm Cluster Complete Guide

#23
post #6

I am looking into this now. Basically it’s either this or the super hard Kubernetes right? I find it hard to believe that we don’t have a middle ground?

This was also my question/frustration. Kubernetes is not so easy to learn, especially if your focus is on other programming projects and you just want a easy and scalable personal server setup.

I've created a tool called 'Swarmlet' over the past few weeks, which tries to mimic Dokku, so it combines git and Docker Swarm mode for easy app deployments. With some services included like Traefik for routing and automatic SSL using Let's Encrypt, with Consul as a distributed secrets store. https://github.com/swarmlet/swarmlet

Definitely not production-ready, and quite some things to do, but it's a nice POC which actually works for me.

Re: Docker Swarm Cluster Complete Guide

#24
post #6

I am looking into this now. Basically it’s either this or the super hard Kubernetes right? I find it hard to believe that we don’t have a middle ground?

Nomad + Consul. Used it for years in prod - just awesome. I’ve also used k8s extensively and nomad/consul is more ”open” and less opinionated. If you also manage some form of legacy infrastructure and VMs, consul is hard to ignore. Two go-binaries - you’re up in minutes for a test drive.

sigh I've almost given up nudging folks on here to give Nomad a spin. It's so easy to deploy and play with, heck you can run a client and server with a single go binary on your local machine. If you compare that to all the hundreds of different (and soon-to-be-deprecated) installation instructions for k8s, k8s feels like a joke at best, or an evil plot at worst to get everyone to use hosted k8s. Honestly, people use hosted k8s because you need a full-time person/team to run it, so in the end, even though k8s is Open Source, Google (and AWS) still win...

Nevermind that Nomad is fast, easy to grasp, very concise and can run non-Docker workloads. Oh well...

Re: Docker Swarm Cluster Complete Guide

#25
post #2

Swarm was interesting, but it seems that both SwarmKit and "Classic Swarm" are dead[1][2], with no real activity since 2018. Kubernetes, for better or for worse, has clearly completely won. Not that this article isn't interesting for it's own sake, but it's just something to consider. 1. https://github.com/docker/swarmkit/graphs/contributors 2. https://github.com/docker/classicswarm/graphs/contributors

SwarmKit and ClassicSwarm are not "docker swarm", but AFAIK precursors of it until they've been merged into Docker itself.

As a production user of Docker Swarm though, it is effectively dead and I've been planning a migration to k8s ASAP.

Re: Docker Swarm Cluster Complete Guide

#26
post #15

Docker Swarm is a marvel. It's super easy to use yet does the job very simply.

On the surface. Easy to setup a simple use case but long term has a similar learning curve to Kubernetes for a production deployment.

Maybe I am missing something or underestimating the complexity of a k8s deployment, but we have been running Swarm in production for a while now and it was/is still a breeze. So what would you consider the complexities of running Swarm in production - I would then like to look into these - as a means of being ahead of the curve of complexity...

Re: Docker Swarm Cluster Complete Guide

#27
post #2

Swarm was interesting, but it seems that both SwarmKit and "Classic Swarm" are dead[1][2], with no real activity since 2018. Kubernetes, for better or for worse, has clearly completely won. Not that this article isn't interesting for it's own sake, but it's just something to consider. 1. https://github.com/docker/swarmkit/graphs/contributors 2. https://github.com/docker/classicswarm/graphs/contributors

That’s very sad to see Docker Swarm declining. I run few production clusters, all are being set up via Ansible and Wireguard for communication. The setup takes only few minutes and runs perfectly fine. It's been running for a while and I haven't had any issues with clusters, as well as it doesn't require maintenance. While Kubernetes is great, it requires a lot of maintenance and setup isn't straightforward. Sometimes you don't need additional complexity and want things just to run and pretty much forget.

Re: Docker Swarm Cluster Complete Guide

#28
post #25
post #2

Swarm was interesting, but it seems that both SwarmKit and "Classic Swarm" are dead[1][2], with no real activity since 2018. Kubernetes, for better or for worse, has clearly completely won. Not that this article isn't interesting for it's own sake, but it's just something to consider. 1. https://github.com/docker/swarmkit/graphs/contributors 2. https://github.com/docker/classicswarm/graphs/contributors

SwarmKit and ClassicSwarm are not "docker swarm", but AFAIK precursors of it until they've been merged into Docker itself. As a production user of Docker Swarm though, it is effectively dead and I've been planning a migration to k8s ASAP.

Swarmkit is the code that runs "Docker Swarm", it is vendored in to build it. I don't think anyone really uses Classic Swarm any more, and it was a precursor.

Re: Docker Swarm Cluster Complete Guide

#29
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nomad + Consul. Used it for years in prod - just awesome. I’ve also used k8s extensively and nomad/consul is more ”open” and less opinionated. If you also manage some form of legacy infrastructure and VMs, consul is hard to ignore. Two go-binaries - you’re up in minutes for a test drive.

I looked into Nomad, did not understand much. I am pretty OK with docker and docker-compose, me and my team use docker to develop data workflows in python locally. So out of Docker I am much less comfortable. For instance, would JupyterHub for Kubernetes run on Nomad? https://zero-to-jupyterhub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/customiz...

It’s not k8s api compatible - so no, not straight off.

You can use nomad to schedule pretty much any workload you’d like, including docker containers.

You could probably schedule a raw command that is “docker-compose”.

Re: Docker Swarm Cluster Complete Guide

#30
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nomad + Consul. Used it for years in prod - just awesome. I’ve also used k8s extensively and nomad/consul is more ”open” and less opinionated. If you also manage some form of legacy infrastructure and VMs, consul is hard to ignore. Two go-binaries - you’re up in minutes for a test drive.

sigh I've almost given up nudging folks on here to give Nomad a spin. It's so easy to deploy and play with, heck you can run a client and server with a single go binary on your local machine. If you compare that to all the hundreds of different (and soon-to-be-deprecated) installation instructions for k8s, k8s feels like a joke at best, or an evil plot at worst to get everyone to use hosted k8s. Honestly, people use…

The “evil plot” is what I gather. K8s have it’s bright spots, but it can’t touch the flexibility of nomad & consul.

Now that nomad/consul have autoscaling and csi as well as native envoy integration the gap, with regards to container workloads, have shrunk quite a bit!

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