I mean k8s is basically an infra rewrite in any shop that was/is currently VM based. "Hey you know that fundamental unit of isolation you've built all your tooling around. Throw it all away."
Don't get me wrong, I would absolutely go with k8s on any greenfield project but there's a huge huge opportunity for someone to take everyone's VM orchestration tools and quietly and semi-transparently add k8s support for gradual migrations.
Isn’t that VMware’s entire pitch for continued relevance?
I see your point there. I only work on the pod side, not touching any metal.
But if you're on-prem, and have a tonne of metal and just arrived in 2014 via a time machine, swarm was so much simpler and simpler that if you were a sysadmin who already had their own scripts -- their own jenkins-powered IC and git-hooks that built and deployed -- whatever it is you were building -- then swarm looked like a nice gradual extension of that, and k8s looked more like starting over and admitting defeat.