To add another side, I use Swarm in production and continue to do so because of how good it is.

I've had clusters running for years without issue. I've even used it for packaging B2B software, where customers use it both in cloud and on-prem - no issues whatsoever.

I've looked at k8s a few times, but it's vastly more complex than Swarm (which is basically Docker Compose with cluster support), and would add nothing for my use case.

I'm sure a lot of people need the functionality that k8s brings, but I'm also sure that many would be better suited to Swarm.

This happened to me too when I was using swarm in 2017. Had to debug swarm networks where nodes could send packets one way but not the other. Similar problems as #2 where stuff just breaks and resetting the node is the quickest way I found to fix it.

Switched to k8s in late 2017 and it’s been much more solid. And that’s where the world has moved, so I’m not sure why you’d choose swarm anymore.

> when I edit them once in a while

Anything new needs a certain amount of sustained practice before you get the hang of it. I think I had to learn regex like four times before it stuck. I haven’t hit that point with TOML yet so I avoid it.

I’d suggest using the deeper indentation style where hyphens for arrays are also indented two spaces under the parent element. Like anything use a linter that enforces unambiguous indentation.

I prefer YAML for human-writeable config because JSON is just more typing and more finicky. The auto-typing of numbers and booleans in YAML is a pretty damn sharp edge though and I wish they’d solved that some other way.