I’ve worked with Swarm in a startup setting. It was an absolute nightmare. We eventually gave up and moved to Kubernetes.

That said, your use case does sound simpler. As I recall, we had to set up service discovery (with Hashicorp Consul) and secret management (with Hashicorp Vault) ourselves. I believe we also used Traefik for load balancing. There were other components as well, but I don’t remember it all. This was over 5 years ago, though.

The difficulty wasn’t configuring each piece but getting them to work together. There was also the time burned learning all the different tools. Kubernetes is great because everything is meant to work together.

But if it’s just two machines with separate configuration, do you even need orchestration? Is there a lot of overhead to just manage them individually?

Unfortunately, it was too long ago to remember the details of differences between compose and swarm. I do remember it was a very trivial conversion.