This seems like a pretty well written overview!

As someone who rather liked Docker Swarm (and still likes it, running my homelab and private cloud stuff on it), it is a bit sad to see it winding down like it, even though there were attempts to capitalize on the nice set of simple functionality that it brought to the table like CapRover: https://caprover.com/

Even though there is still some nice software to manage installs of it, like Portainer: https://www.portainer.io/ (which also works for Kubernetes, like a smaller version of Rancher)

Even though the resource usage is far lower than that of almost any Kubernetes distro that I've used (microk8s, K3s and K0s included), the Compose format being pretty much amazing for most smaller deployments and Compose still being one of the better ways to run things locally in addition to Swarm for remote deployments (Skaffold or other K8s local cluster solutions just feel complex in comparison).

And yet, that's probably not where the future lies. Kubernetes won. Well, Nomad is also pretty good, admittedly.

Though if you absolutely do need Kubernetes, personally I'd suggest that you look in the direction of Rancher for a simple UI to manage it, or at least drill down into the cluster state, without needing too much digging through a CLI: https://rancher.com/

Lots of folks actually like k9s as well, if you do like the TUI approach a bit more: https://k9scli.io/

But for the actual clusters, assuming that you ever want to self-host one, ideally a turnkey solution, RKE is good, K0s is also promising, but personally I'd go with K3s: https://k3s.io/ which has been really stable on DEB distros and mostly works okay on RPM ones (if you cannot afford OpenShift or to wait for MicroShift).

My only pet peeve being that the Traefik ingress is a little bit under-documented (e.g. how to configure common use cases, like a SSL certificate, one with an intermediate certificate, maybe a wildcard, or perhaps just use Let's Encrypt, how to set defaults vs defining them per domain).

For the folks with thicker wallets, though, I'd suggest to just give in and pay someone to run a cluster for you: that way you'll get something vaguely portable, will make lots of the aspects in regards to running it someone else's problem and will be able to leverage the actual benefits of working with the container orchestrator.

Oh, also Helm is actually pretty nice, since the templates it generates for you by default are actually reasonable and can serve as a nice starting point for your own application deployment deescriptions, versus trying to write your own Kubernetes manifest from 0 which feels like an uphill battle, at least when compared with the simplicity of Compose.

In regards to Nomad, however, I feel like a UI that would let you click around and get bunches of HCL to describe the deployment that you want would be pretty cool. At least when starting out, something like that can really flatten the learning curve. That's also kind of why I like Portainer or Rancher so much, or even something like: https://k8syaml.com/

> To extend its reach across multiple hosts, Docker introduced Swarm mode in 2016. This is actually the second product from Docker to bear the name "Swarm" — a product from 2014 implemented a completely different approach to running containers across multiple hosts, but it is no longer maintained. It was replaced by SwarmKit, which provides the underpinnings of the current version of Docker Swarm.

On an unrelated note, this, at least to me, feels like pretty bad naming and management of the whole initiative, though. Of course, if the features are there, it shouldn't be enough to scare anyone away from the project, but at the same time it could have been a bit simpler.