Use the right tools for the job. I continue to run small to medium scale deployments with a couple dozen containers with Swarm. It's smooth, and just works. Kubernetes would work too, and I use it for newer deployments.
Heck, I use plain old docker-compose to manage production servers with half a dozen containers, trouble-free for a few years now. Compose v2 seems promising, I've been using it for a while and it's pretty stable too.
Swarm could have been an industry in itself, a de-facto standard for orchestration if it had been marketed and supported right. It was a lot more stable than Kubernetes in the early days and things just worked with docker while you'd have to kludge a few things to get Kubernetes doing its thing right.
Heck, I use plain old docker-compose to manage production servers with half a dozen containers, trouble-free for a few years now. Compose v2 seems promising, I've been using it for a while and it's pretty stable too.
Swarm could have been an industry in itself, a de-facto standard for orchestration if it had been marketed and supported right. It was a lot more stable than Kubernetes in the early days and things just worked with docker while you'd have to kludge a few things to get Kubernetes doing its thing right.