There's no direct migration path from Swarm to Kubernetes, so we chose to start out at a small scale with the latter. It was enough of a leap to fundamentally change how we were building and deploying things. We didn't want to do it twice!

You can dodge much of the operational complexity in standing a cluster up by starting with Google Container Engine or a provisioner like kops. Once you have enough comfort, you can get more fancy and build something more customized to your cases.