I'm not trying to take a shot at the OP, but I keep seeing posts labeled "Production-Grade" that still look more like pet systems than cattle. I'm struggling to understand how something like this can be reproduced consistently across environments. How would you package this inside a Git repo? Can it be managed through GitOps? And if we're calling something production-grade, high availability should be a baseline requirement since it's table stakes for modern production applications.
What I'd really love is a middle ground between k8s and Docker Swarm that gives operators and developers what they need while still providing an escape hatch to k8s when required. k8s is immensely powerful but often feels like overkill for teams that just need simple orchestration, predictable deployments, and basic resiliency. On the other hand, Swarm is easy to use but doesn't offer the extensibility, ecosystem, or long-term viability that many organizations now expect. It feels like there's a missing layer in between: something lightweight enough to operate without a dedicated platform team, but structured enough to support best practices such as declarative config, GitOps workflows, and repeatable environments.
As I write this, I'm realizing that part of the issue is the increasing complexity of our services. Every team wants a clean, Unix-like architecture made up of small components that each do one job really well. Philosophically that sounds great, but in practice it leads to a huge amount of integration work. Each "small tool" comes with its own configuration, lifecycle, upgrade path, and operational concerns. When you stack enough of those together, the end result is a system that is actually more complex than the monoliths we moved away from. A simple deployment quickly becomes a tower of YAML, sidecars, controllers, and operators. So even when we're just trying to run a few services reliably, the cumulative complexity of the ecosystem pushes us toward heavyweight solutions like k8s, even if the problem doesn't truly require it.
yrxuthst•1h ago
I have not used quadlets in a "real" production environment but deploying systemd services is very easy to automate with something like Ansible.
But I don't see this as a replacement for k8s as a platform for generic applications, more for deploying a specific set of containers to a fleet of servers with less overhead and complexity.
figmert•46m ago
> Ansible
OP asked for something consistent and between K8s and Swarm. Ansible is just a mistake that people refuse to stop using.
the_alchemist•27m ago
Please elaborate
figmert•14m ago
Ansible is a procedural mess. It's like helm had a baby with a very bad procedural language. It works, but it's such a mess to work with. Half of the time it breaks because you haven't thought about some if statement that covers a single node or some bs.
Comparing that to docker swarm and/or k8s manifests (I guess even Helm if you're not the one developing charts), Ansible is a complete mess. You're better off managing things with Puppet or Salt, as that gives you an actual declarative mechanism (i.e. desired state like K8s manifests).
betaby•15m ago
> Ansible is just a mistake that people refuse to stop using.
So is Helm! Helm is just a mistake that people refuse to stop using.
smjburton•1h ago
This is a great resource OP. Hopefully with more guides like this available, it will make it easier for people who want to explore Podman and increase adoption.
ivolimmen•47m ago
Kubernetes is sometimes just overkill to deploy a simple application and just zip, unpack and start a script is sometimes too fragile and crappy. This is something I would like to try on my Pine64 when I run some simple utility (online) software.
betaby•10m ago
This setup uses user-space networking as I understand.
silasb•1h ago
What I'd really love is a middle ground between k8s and Docker Swarm that gives operators and developers what they need while still providing an escape hatch to k8s when required. k8s is immensely powerful but often feels like overkill for teams that just need simple orchestration, predictable deployments, and basic resiliency. On the other hand, Swarm is easy to use but doesn't offer the extensibility, ecosystem, or long-term viability that many organizations now expect. It feels like there's a missing layer in between: something lightweight enough to operate without a dedicated platform team, but structured enough to support best practices such as declarative config, GitOps workflows, and repeatable environments.
As I write this, I'm realizing that part of the issue is the increasing complexity of our services. Every team wants a clean, Unix-like architecture made up of small components that each do one job really well. Philosophically that sounds great, but in practice it leads to a huge amount of integration work. Each "small tool" comes with its own configuration, lifecycle, upgrade path, and operational concerns. When you stack enough of those together, the end result is a system that is actually more complex than the monoliths we moved away from. A simple deployment quickly becomes a tower of YAML, sidecars, controllers, and operators. So even when we're just trying to run a few services reliably, the cumulative complexity of the ecosystem pushes us toward heavyweight solutions like k8s, even if the problem doesn't truly require it.
yrxuthst•1h ago
But I don't see this as a replacement for k8s as a platform for generic applications, more for deploying a specific set of containers to a fleet of servers with less overhead and complexity.
figmert•46m ago
OP asked for something consistent and between K8s and Swarm. Ansible is just a mistake that people refuse to stop using.
the_alchemist•27m ago
figmert•14m ago
Comparing that to docker swarm and/or k8s manifests (I guess even Helm if you're not the one developing charts), Ansible is a complete mess. You're better off managing things with Puppet or Salt, as that gives you an actual declarative mechanism (i.e. desired state like K8s manifests).
betaby•15m ago
So is Helm! Helm is just a mistake that people refuse to stop using.