> In a production environment one would probably deploy using something like Fargate, Kubernetes or Fly.io.
Docker swarm mode is pretty good and terribly easy to get up and running in no time.
I have a few small personal projects hosted on Herzner on a couple of Docker swarm mode deployments with 100% uptime in the past two years, and all it took to get that infra up and running is installing Docker on a bare Linux node.
The only downside I'm aware is that inter-node traffic speeds can be relatively low.
I've worked with docker swarm extensively. I've managed it but also automated the deployment and implemented several features to ease deployment using the swarm API.
Swarm pros:
- Easy to setup
- Easy to run
- Relatively easy to debug
Swarm cons:
- Many problems persist for years. Some because of lack of resources, others because the problem is simply too hard.
- The community and automation around swarm is small
- Problems solved by third party tools, apps, etc. in kubernetes require in-house workarounds or solutions (e.g. there was an API to perform autoscaling, but we had to write the python app that will read data from prometheus and scale-in/out the deployment)
What I found it with Swarm is that it was extremely resilient. At some point the swarm cluster was running on AWS for ~2 years with minimal maintenance. That would have been impossible even for a managed EKS cluster for example. There are simply too many things that can go wrong.
