I don't think Swarm Mode failed. We are using it in production for 1000s of Hosts very reliably, it's a great piece of technology! :-)

K8s simply has all the hype and no one got fired for running k8s. I was thinking the same as you, k8s is quite complex, has a lot of options and moving parts which we don't need.

I agree - “failed” may be not the best word. I mean failed only compared to the k8s abundance.

Anyway, impressive scale for Swarm! Are there any crucial features you miss in Swarm?