Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Swarmlet: A self-hosted, open-source Platform as a Service

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 47 posts

Re: Swarmlet: A self-hosted, open-source Platform as a Service

#21

Post by bovermyer »

131hn wrote: post #12
bovermyer wrote: post #10

Swarm was great. Docker/Moby should never have abandoned it. Kubernetes solves a similar class of problems to Swarm, but in a much more complex way. Sometimes that complexity helps solve problems. For many organizations, though, Swarm would have been the better option. Both Swarm and Kubernetes have their purposes. I'm sad that no option has popped up to replace Swarm in the "simple and easy container orchestration"…

what makes you think docker swarm is abandonned ? The latest docker engine release (23.0) continue support it and add new features

A few years ago (2018?), I read somewhere - I think it was on Hacker News, even - that Docker/Moby was quietly dropping paid support for Swarm.

I've had a hard time finding much via hn.algolia.com to back this up, other than some discussions in mid-2018, though.

Re: Swarmlet: A self-hosted, open-source Platform as a Service

#22

Post by grepfru_it »

mono-bob wrote: post #3
lordpankake wrote: post #2

Sadly like many Docker Swarm based projects, this has become abandonware. I use Docker Swarm with Portainer for managing services with ecoeats[1], a decision that was made years ago, just before Swarm was revealed to be absolutely dead in the water. I initially used Swarmlet before switching to Portainer, as there were far too many bugs and missing tools needed to effectively manage a Swarm that went beyond stateless…

I really liked the option to deploy through a git push without additional setup. But it indeed looks like abandonware, thanks for sharing your experience! If you would start over, would you choose for Portainer and Swarm again? Do you know of any alternatives to Swarmlet?

Portainer can poll your git repo and supports webhooks. I went with portainer early on and haven't looked back.

Re: Swarmlet: A self-hosted, open-source Platform as a Service

#23

Post by maxnoe »

ungawatkt wrote: post #14
bovermyer wrote: post #10

Swarm was great. Docker/Moby should never have abandoned it. Kubernetes solves a similar class of problems to Swarm, but in a much more complex way. Sometimes that complexity helps solve problems. For many organizations, though, Swarm would have been the better option. Both Swarm and Kubernetes have their purposes. I'm sad that no option has popped up to replace Swarm in the "simple and easy container orchestration"…

I've been trying out Nomad on a home server setup, its still not as simple as Swarm and has some hard edges to learn around, but overall it hasn't been a bad experience, definitely easier than my attempts at k8s. And Nomad got basic built in service discovery in the last couple versions, which was the main thing turning me away (it used to require running Consul).

Can you describe your setup?

I tried setting up nomad but couldn't figure out service discovery, external ingress / letsencrypt in the time I allotted myself...

Re: Swarmlet: A self-hosted, open-source Platform as a Service

#24

Post by sschueller »

the_common_man wrote: post #8
lordpankake wrote: post #2

Sadly like many Docker Swarm based projects, this has become abandonware. I use Docker Swarm with Portainer for managing services with ecoeats[1], a decision that was made years ago, just before Swarm was revealed to be absolutely dead in the water. I initially used Swarmlet before switching to Portainer, as there were far too many bugs and missing tools needed to effectively manage a Swarm that went beyond stateless…

portainer now has a banner to subscribe as well on the free version

Portainer also has default opt-out analytics via matomo. According to their github the analytics are in Germany but the DNS points to server in France at the moment. Either way, I find it questionable to have analytics running on self hosted open source software.

Re: Swarmlet: A self-hosted, open-source Platform as a Service

#25

Post by nesarkvechnep »

maxnoe wrote: post #23
ungawatkt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying out Nomad on a home server setup, its still not as simple as Swarm and has some hard edges to learn around, but overall it hasn't been a bad experience, definitely easier than my attempts at k8s. And Nomad got basic built in service discovery in the last couple versions, which was the main thing turning me away (it used to require running Consul).

Can you describe your setup? I tried setting up nomad but couldn't figure out service discovery, external ingress / letsencrypt in the time I allotted myself...

You won't find a resource which encompasses that. I have the feeling its purposeful so you pay for a course or certificate.

Re: Swarmlet: A self-hosted, open-source Platform as a Service

#26

Post by kakoni »

bovermyer wrote: post #10

Swarm was great. Docker/Moby should never have abandoned it. Kubernetes solves a similar class of problems to Swarm, but in a much more complex way. Sometimes that complexity helps solve problems. For many organizations, though, Swarm would have been the better option. Both Swarm and Kubernetes have their purposes. I'm sad that no option has popped up to replace Swarm in the "simple and easy container orchestration"…

This doesn't look that abandoned? https://github.com/moby/swarmkit

Or are you talking about swarm the product (versus docker swarm mode)

Re: Swarmlet: A self-hosted, open-source Platform as a Service

#27

Post by 9dev »

I have built all our infrastructure on Docker Swarm before learning about its state. Currently waging migrating to Nomad out of fear for K8s complexity - I’ve worked with it in a previous job with more employees than now, and it still was a big hassle - but am afraid I’ll repeat the same mistake and should just bite the bullet.

Does anyone have suggestions?

Re: Swarmlet: A self-hosted, open-source Platform as a Service

#28

Post by ungawatkt »

maxnoe wrote: post #23
ungawatkt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying out Nomad on a home server setup, its still not as simple as Swarm and has some hard edges to learn around, but overall it hasn't been a bad experience, definitely easier than my attempts at k8s. And Nomad got basic built in service discovery in the last couple versions, which was the main thing turning me away (it used to require running Consul).

Can you describe your setup? I tried setting up nomad but couldn't figure out service discovery, external ingress / letsencrypt in the time I allotted myself...

Nomad running as a server (manager) and client (worker) on the main server, and as a client on a rpi3, through systemd on both, the install [0] and deploy [1] instructions worked well enough. It has constraints to control which client takes what workload (ex. I don't care which runs ddclient, but photoprism can't move to the rpi, and the sensor readers can't leave the rpi).

Caddy for reverse proxy and tls handling running as a service, so all ingress goes through that, there wasn't too much exciting there. I was porting over a docker-compose workload, so most services have a static port and I just route to the port in the caddyfile (I passed my router as the DNS for the reverse proxy, so its by hostname). I'll get caddy to use nomad for service addresses at some point.

But for photoprism, I've got the service discovery set up to its database, it's kind of awkward since the nomad native discovery goes into env vars or a file through the `template` block [2], but it does work.

Nomad is pickier about setting resource limits, so I had to actually set those to something reasonable.

I've mostly got Docker based services, so this reference [3] has been useful. There's a couple ways to mount the volumes, which is annoying, and there's some gotchas around docker image handling (short shorty is don't use the `latest` tag).

I probably haven't organized my jobs/groups/tasks well (the analog to k8s pods hierarchy), but that's for later.

[0] https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/tutorials/get-started/... [1] https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/tutorials/enterprise/p... [2] https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/nomad-service-discovery [3] https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/docs/drivers/docker

Re: Swarmlet: A self-hosted, open-source Platform as a Service

#29

Post by foverzar »

GiorgioG wrote: post #9
gigatexal wrote: post #7

Not worth the effort. Best to learn k8s. Inertia is a thing; and k8s has the ecosystem behind it. It’s also a vibrant project and is evolving.

Best to stay the hell away from k8s if you care about being productive. You're not Google and we'll all be better for it when everyone admits that fact.

You don't really need to be Google to have a few runtimes with healthchecks across a few nodes with a few metrics and an ssl-terminating reverse proxy.

This is a pretty basic setup and with k3s one can be very productive at it. In fact, you will very likely hit quite a lot of k8s bottlenecks at Google scale if you throw everything at a single cluster.

I feel like we would actually be better off if people admit they'd rather manage all the complexity by hand all the tine, than spend a few hours reading the docs on k8s objects properties and lifecycles - that's really all there is to it for basic setups like k3s.

Re: Swarmlet: A self-hosted, open-source Platform as a Service

#30

Post by e12e »

ungawatkt wrote: post #28
maxnoe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you describe your setup? I tried setting up nomad but couldn't figure out service discovery, external ingress / letsencrypt in the time I allotted myself...

Nomad running as a server (manager) and client (worker) on the main server, and as a client on a rpi3, through systemd on both, the install [0] and deploy [1] instructions worked well enough. It has constraints to control which client takes what workload (ex. I don't care which runs ddclient, but photoprism can't move to the rpi, and the sensor readers can't leave the rpi). Caddy for reverse proxy and tls handling ru…

> services have a static port and I just route to the port in the caddyfile

Just so I understand - this means deploying a new service involves building a docker image, deploy it, then manually update the caddyfile (ie manual ingress)?

> There's a couple ways to mount the volumes, which is annoying,

Fwiw this is annoying on multi-node docker swarm too - i even consider proper volume support to be one of the strongest arguments for considering k8s even for somewhat simple setups.

Post reply on HN