(Early Rancher employee)

We liked our Cattle orchestration and ease of use of 1.x as much as the next person. Hell, I still like a lot of it better.

But just as this article talks about with Swarm, embracing K8s was absolutely the right move. We were the smallest of at least 4 major choices.

Picking the right horse early enough and making K8s easier to use led us to a successful exit and continued relevance (now in SUSE) instead of a slow painful spiral to irrelevance like Swarm, Mesos, and others and eventual fire-sale.