> In general, I really love the idea of running all your stuff on a server you own as opposed to e.g. Heroku or AWS. Simple predictable monthly bill really gives you peace of mind.

Have you found hosting you like with bandwidth expense caps? I'm looking for something like this but I don't want surprise network bills if I misconfigure something.

> Have you found hosting you like with bandwidth expense caps?

Not exactly what you're looking for, but solves the same problem in a different way:

I've been quite happy with using Hetzner's dedicated servers which come with 1 GBit unmetered connection (unlimited bandwidth), so no surprise network charges :)

Note that if you saturate that 1Gbps link they will almost certainly ask you to stop. Lots of VPS offer "unlimited" but it's really not. It's only unlimited within their "fair use" restrictions, ie only as long as they think it's reasonable.

Would love to be shown a counterexample provider.

that's fine. if you're on that level either you're doing something wrong and should stop or you are making lots of money and should upgrade.

aws will just charge you regardless.

This happened once (?) in the history of LowEndTalk and Hetzner, and that was someone who was using several servers, 27/7, over several months at 100% link utilization to shovel raw footage around.

You are very unlikely to replicate this running any type of personal infrastructure. Or anything that's not specifically this.

It’s not really unlimited as they will charge you $1/TB for what they call “overusage”.

That's cloud, non-standard NICs, load balancers or vSwitches. Their standard 1 Gbps link does not charge usage fees. The one person that reported it did it on several servers, over 3+ months - and they weren't charged, just asked to slow down or upgrade to a dedicated link.

5-10x cheaper than AWS still.

Yeah, I think plenty of VPS providers do unmetered traffic too. Mine has a limit but it's something like 8 TB/mo, so I'm not particularly worried either.

Perhaps Hetzner or OVH?

I'm curious as to your thoughts around Swarm.

My concern around Swarm is around the Docker corporation, which appears to be struggling.

As a competitor, we have Nomad, but with the recent IBM acquisition, I'm concerned about Nomad's future.

I do have some concerns about Docker Inc. and Mirantis (which now owns Docker Swarm I believe), yeah. Swarm is pretty mature though, and while I don't think it's going anywhere soon, I don't think we'll get any more core features anytime soon.

For Lunni, my plan is to add support for another orchestrator while keeping the developer experience of just working with docker-compose.yml. I really didn't want to do K8s, but given it's essentially an open standard now, it should be a safer bet than Nomad. I guess we'll see when I can get to it!

IBM bought Nomad? That's disappointing to hear.

Nomad was always much better than k8s, sad that it never got the same kind of traction or mindshare.

My gripe with nomad was that it didn't have init containers. You were basically forced to either have an endlessly growing job specification file or put consul-template in every single container image.

Do you mind if I ask why you chose Docker Swarm? I don't know that much about Swarm and I'd love to know what you think about it compared to K8s (in terms of ease, nice things, things missing, etc.)

Not lunni's dev, but a Swarm fan :-)

I'm a swarm user, but using single node swarms. It's the best solution I found for deploying apps. A lot of projects publish docker compose files, and those are easily usable with Swarm after some small modifications. I'm using the setup described at dockerswarm.rocks [1] and it's smooth sailing.

It's a real pitty, and still surprises me, Swarm is not more popular. It's still maintained [2] but few people still recommend it (even dockerswarm.rocks doesn't anymore). I've switched to it in 2022 [2] thinking I didn't take a lot of risk as starting with it is a really a low investment, and I'm still satisfied with it. I've deployed a new server with it recently.

1: https://dockerswarm.rocks/traefik/ 2: https://www.yvesdennels.com/posts/docker-swarm-in-2022/

The main reason probably was the fact that I was already familiar with Docker and Docker Compose. Kubernetes introduces a whole lot of concepts that I didn't feel like studying up, plus there was a 3-node minimum requirement. I just wanted to be able to start with a single node and be able to scale up if needed, so Swarm just felt like a natural match here.

I'm looking into K8s and other orchestrators like Nomad and perhaps will add support in Lunni at some point, but for now I believe Swarm is the sweet spot for smaller deployments (from single server up to maybe a couple hundred nodes).

There are several k8s implementations that are fine with a single node: k3s in particular is worth a look. But Swarm is still quite legit in my book.

I'll look into it, thank you so much! Way back then there wasn't a lot of choice though. I think I've played with Minikube but that was not recommended for production, and all the other distributions were huge (or at least I thought so!).

There isn't actually ( nor was there ever ) a 3 node requirement for k8s.

Etcd requires 3 boxes for HA, but nothing stops you running a single node etcd.

I personally run single master clusters, because if the master goes down, you lose management as opposed to actual service availability, so mostly I don't care.

Now that there's anything wrong with your preference.

I might be misremembering it, huh! Yeah, it's pretty much the same as Swarm then (any odd number of manager nodes is valid, and if more than a half go down you only lose the management ability and everything else stays up).

How's Lunni going? Is swarm working well? I remember an announcement of it some time ago :-)

Not too bad, except I have no idea how many users we have :')

Swarm still works pretty smoothly for me, although I'm worried about the Mirantis situation, too. I'm currently working on a new backend, which will also enable us to plug in other orchestrators if need arises.