You can have a swarm with only a handful of commands now, with TLS (for docker api). Eventually stable docker host to docker host container networking will have encryption out of the box too. The number of steps for a production docker setup keeps getting shorter and shorter, kubernetes seems to be now focused on this aspect, they might catch up. This is all of course ignoring the IaaS solutions and obviously for the reasons stated in the article, swarm doesn't see those benefits with 1.12 because major features do not work yet which are supposedly stable.