Portainer VS swarmpit

Thank you for the information. We are currently reviewing and investigating. Updates to follow here: https://github.com/portainer/portainer/issues/8455

Upstream bug report: https://github.com/portainer/portainer/issues/8455

Portainer

Portainer is also a good choice. Always my first container deployed alongside Docker/Podman: https://www.portainer.io/

I'd say that going from Docker Compose to Docker Swarm is the first logical step, because it's included in a Docker install and also uses the same Compose format (with more parameters, such as deployment constraints, like which node hostname or tag you want a certain container to be scheduled on): https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-file-v3... That said, you won't see lots of Docker Swarm professionally anymore - it's just the way the job market is, despite it being completely sufficient for many smaller projects out there, I'm running it in prod successfully so far and it's great.

Another reasonably lightweight alternative would be Hashicorp Nomad, because it's free, simple to deploy and their HCL format isn't too bad either, as long as you keep things simple, in addition to them supporting more than just container workloads: https://www.hashicorp.com/products/nomad That said, if you don't buy into HashiStack too much, then there won't be too much benefit from learning HCL and translating the contents of various example docker-compose.yml files that you see in a variety of repos out there, although their other tools are nice - for example, Consul (a service mesh). This is a nice but also a bit niche option.

Lastly, there is Kubernetes. It's complicated, even more so when you get into solutions like Istio, typically eats up lots of resources, can be difficult to manage and debug, but does pretty much anything that you might need, as long as you have either enough people to administer it, or a wallet that's thick enough for you to pay one of the cloud vendors to do it for you. Personally, I'd look into the lightweight clusters at first, like k0s, MicroK8s, or perhaps the K3s project in particular: https://k3s.io/

I'd also suggest that if you get this far, don't be afraid to look into options for dashboards and web based UIs to make exploring things easier:

  - for Docker Swarm and Kubernetes there is Portainer: https://www.portainer.io/

Portainer - Makes managing my homelab, gateway and (Pi0) DNS server extremely easy and fun. Traefik - Great companion for the above. For those who don't know for some reason - a simple, yet extremely powerful reverse proxy. Docker - Should be obvious, but I would feel bad if I didn't give it a shoutout. If you haven't heard of it - go and learn, please, it'll make your life beautiful.

Portainer - Web UI for managing Docker Containers

> Why there are needs to use docker GUIs?

Because to some people using GUIs are more approachable and in some case objectively better (e.g. telling the state of things at a glance and efficiently using screen real estate, with graphs and whatnot), whereas the ways they're worse in might not dealbreakers (e.g. lack of automation, given that there can still be APIs or access to the underlying cluster anyways).

For an example of this, see pieces of software that one can use to manage orchestrators:

- Portainer: https://www.portainer.io/

- Rancher: https://www.rancher.com/products/rancher

Some orchestrators even include dashboards on their own:

- Kubernetes dashboard: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/...

- Nomad web UI: https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/tutorials/web-ui

And some of that applies to running regular containers and managing them locally: for many it can be useful to be able to just click around to discover more details about a container, as well as what's using storage and so on. Thankfully the CLIs of Docker and competing runtimes are pretty well structured as they are, but I guess it's just a different type of UX.

At the end of the day, what works for you, or even what you find comfortable to use, might not be the case for someone else and vice versa. It's definitely nice to have that choice in the first place, and to know the various options out there.

- Portainer

So I need to setup prometheus, granfana, node exporter, and cadvisor before running this? All of the above give me everything I need to monitor a swarmcluster. And if I want multi-user access to the graphs, I’d configure auth in Grafana.

Further, if I were to monitor Swarm without the Prom+Grafana stack, I’d be looking at:

https://github.com/swarmpit/swarmpit

What is the value-add of Storm?

Kubernetes is a bit overkill. For my homegrown usage i use docker swarm. And use https://swarmpit.io to manage it

> There is gap in the market between VM oriented simple deployments and kubernetes based setup.

In my experience, there are actually two platforms that do this pretty well.

First, there's Docker Swarm ( https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/ ) - it comes preinstalled with Docker, can handle either single machine deployments or clusters, even multi-master deployments. Furthermore, it just adds a few values to Docker Compose YAML format ( https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-file-v3... ) , so it's incredibly easy to launch containers with it. And there are lovely web interfaces, such as Portainer ( https://www.portainer.io/ ) or Swarmpit ( https://swarmpit.io/ ) for simpler management.

Secondly, there's also Hashicorp Nomad ( https://www.nomadproject.io/ ) - it's a single executable package, which allows similar setups to Docker Swarm, integrates nicely with service meshes like Consul ( https://www.consul.io/ ), and also allows non-containerized deployments to be managed, such as Java applications and others ( https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/drivers ). The only serious downsides is having to use the HCL DSL ( https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl ) and their web UI being read only in the last versions that i checked.

There are also some other tools, like CapRover ( https://caprover.com/ ) available, but many of those use Docker Swarm under the hood and i personally haven't used them. Of course, if you still want Kubernetes but implemented in a slightly simpler way, then there's also the Rancher K3s project ( https://k3s.io/ ) which packages the core of Kubernetes into a smaller executable and uses SQLite by default for storage, if i recall correctly. I've used it briefly and the resource usage was indeed far more reasonable than that of full Kubernetes clusters (like RKE).