Docker ships with swarm, and swarm + a compose file does everything you just described.
Swarm is such a pleasant and easy alternative that comes out of the box with Docker, does 90% of what Kubernetes does, and does 100% of what anyone with less than 50 servers needs. The learning curve is also an order of magnitude easier.
I just installed Docker via package manager so I guess I never really learned about the organization's offerings in total and didn't know which product I had (CE for Linux). Is there a more up-to-date/better practice for using Docker CE with k8s than this guide dated March[0] using Minikube[1]?
Totally agree. Docker Compose is excellent for local development, and Docker Swarm mode uses the same file and is almost the same thing. Some minor additions in extra docker-compose files and it's ready for production in a cluster. I don't get why Swarm is so underrated. For the same $5 bucks in a full Linux VPS with Linode or DigitalOcean (or even the free tier in Google Cloud) you can get a full cluster, starting with a single node, including automatic HTTPS certificates, etc. Here's my quick guide, with a Linux from scratch to a prod server in about 20 min. Including full-stack app: https://github.com/tiangolo/full-stack/blob/master/docker-sw...
Fully agree. K8s is mostly beneficial for larger companies, because of namespaces support, and devops authentication.
For smaller teams Swarm is just way more practical and versatile.
Swarm is such a pleasant and easy alternative that comes out of the box with Docker, does 90% of what Kubernetes does, and does 100% of what anyone with less than 50 servers needs. The learning curve is also an order of magnitude easier.