Self-Hosting like it's 2025

Exactly, my first reaction was "I should write a blog post about why I still use Docker Swarm". I deploy to single node swarms, and it's a zero boiler plate solution. I had to migrate services to another server recently, and it was really painless. Why oh why doesn't Docker Swarm get more love (from its owners/maintainers and users)?....

Edit: anyone actually interested in such a post?

I moved us off docker swarm to GKE some years back. The multi node swarm was quite unstable, and none of the big cloud providers offered managed swarm in the same way they offer managed k8s.

It's a shame I agree because it was nicely integrated with dockers own tooling. Plus I wouldn't have had to learn about k8s :)

I just want to add that I also have a Docker Swarm running, with four small nodes for my personal stuff plus a couple of friends' companies.

No issues whatsoever and it is so easy to manage. It just works!

I'd be interested. Might be a strange question but I'll throw it out there, I seem to have a hard time finding a good way to define my self hosted infrastructure nodes and which containers can run on them, have you run into/have a solution for this? Like I want my database to run on my two beefier machines but some of the other services could run on the mini pcs.

yes, please.

> I deploy to single node swarms, and it's a zero boiler plate solution.

Yup, it's basically like a "Docker Compose Manager" that lets you group containers more easily, since the manifest file format is basically Docker Compose's with just 1-2 tiny differences.

If there's one thing I would like Docker Swarm to have, is to not have to worry about which node creates a volume, I just want the service to always be deployed with the same volume without having to think about it.

That's the one weakness I see for multi-node stacks, the thing that prevents it from being "Docker Compose but distributed". So that's probably the point where I'd recommend maybe taking a look at Kubernetes.

I am running one-node swarms, so everything I deploy is running on the same node. But from my understanding you can apply labels to the nodes, and limit the placement of containers. See here for an example (I am not affiliated to this site): https://www.sweharris.org/post/2017-07-30-docker-placement/

I am very interested. I tried to migrate to Swarm, got annoyed at incompatibility with tons of small Docker Compose things, and decided against that. I'd love to read about your setup.

Would love a blog post on how you're using Docker Swarm.

bugs in it's infancy is what killed swarm for users.

Yep. I run a small swarm at work and have a 5-node RPi-4 swarm at home. Interested in why you'd run a single-node swarm instead of stand-alone docker.