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Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

The two-ish years of Docker Swarm trying to fight with k8s and the weird tensions around Docker as the runtime in k8s probably wouldn't have happened if Docker had decided to join forces rather than actively compete.

Anyone familiar with how the swarm and k8s politics played out would know it was not a collaboration at all.

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I agree that Docker took too long to embrace Kubernetes once it was obvious it had more momentum than all other orchestration projects combined. But nickstinemates suggests that Docker could have and should have “collaborated” much sooner than that, even before Kubernetes had launched. I wonder what that means in practice. What exactly should Docker have done, that they didn’t? And how would it have changed the outcome?

Docker could have never created Swarm and Compose at all. In hindsight if they went all-in on k8s from the beginning then they might now be the leader in enterprise k8s instead of Red Hat and IBM would be buying them. But this wasn't clear at all in 2014-2015.

Compose existed before k8s, and was created by a small company that Docker acquihired.

Personally, I like Docker Compose and Swarm, at the very least for non-production workloads - they're just so much lighter and simpler than k8s.

I actually would have liked to see Docker not give up on Swarm so readily. There's absolutely room for a something simpler than k8s.

Hindsight is 20/20. I recall looking at k8s and swarm closely circa 2014-2015. K8s wasn't very good. The networking worked best in the Google cloud .. not your usual datacenter. I recall concluding Swarm was the better tech. If history was any guide, k8s would lose steam. The borg connection .. I duno how much actual code went in there.

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