Sorry I do not understand that statement, in my naive opinion Docker Swarm seems to be a thing. Care to elaborate, please?
We are actually currently in the process of migrating from Docker Swarm to k8s and I am not 100% sure that's a good idea. We will see.
https://www.mirantis.com/blog/mirantis-will-continue-to-supp...
To be clear, I use Docker Swarm in my home cluster due to simplicity and ease of use. Unfortunately that pattern hasn't scaled to the Enterprise.
They never really retired it but at this point it's a footnote in Docker releases.
I've not actually encountered it in the wild in four years or so and never in a production setup.
It's just so damn simple in comparison to k8s - basically, if you know Docker Compose, you know Docker Swarm.
I appreciate it doesn't have the full power of k8s, but it has what most apps need: simple deployments, zero-downtime updates, distributed configs and secrets.
If you can get away with it, vanilla docker hosts running docker compose provide most of the same benefits with a fraction of the cost. For most startups, that's a great way to avoid getting sucked into a black hole of non value adding devops activity. You lose some flexibility but vanilla ubuntu hosts with vanilla docker installs are easy to setup and manage. We used packer and ansible to build amis for this a few years ago with some very minimal scripts for container deploys.