One of the three teams I worked with burned three months setting up Kubernetes and still didn't have user login. Not because login is hard—it's literally a solved problem. But because they'd convinced themselves that proper infrastructure came first. They had Helm charts. They had monitoring. They had a staging cluster that mirrored production. What they didn't have were users, because they'd spent twelve weeks becoming Kubernetes experts instead of building the thing people would actually pay for.

They ran out of money six months later.

This isn't a strawman. This is a pattern I've watched repeat itself with shocking regularity. Smart engineers pick Kubernetes for their MVP because it feels like the "right" choice—the grown-up choice. It's what Google uses, after all. But Google has thousands of services and site reliability engineers whose entire job is keeping that machinery humming. You have three developers and a runway that's shorter than you think.

The Swarm Appeal

Docker Swarm is boring. Deeply, profoundly boring. And that's exactly why it's perfect for early-stage products.

If you're already using docker-compose.yml for local development—and you should be—Swarm is about fifteen minutes of configuration away. The transition is almost embarrassingly simple. You add a few deploy directives, point at your swarm cluster, and run docker stack deploy. That's it. You're orchestrated.

The entire mental model fits in your head. Services, networks, secrets. No custom resource definitions. No operators. No fifteen different ways to configure ingress that all seem wrong. You get built-in load balancing, rolling updates, and automatic container rescheduling if a node dies. For a product with 100 users—or 10,000—this is plenty.

In my experience, teams underestimate how much cognitive overhead matters in the early days. You're already juggling product decisions, user feedback, fundraising conversations, and the daily fires that come with building something new. Every hour spent debugging a Kubernetes networking policy is an hour you didn't spend talking to users or fixing the broken checkout flow.

Swarm gets out of your way. It's the infrastructure equivalent of a reliable Honda Civic. Not exciting, not impressive, but it starts every morning and doesn't require you to become a mechanic.

The K8s Resume-Driven Development Problem

Let's be honest about why Kubernetes shows up in so many early-stage architectures: resume-driven development.

Developers—especially good ones—are thinking about their next job before they've finished their current one. Kubernetes is a line item that signals seriousness. It suggests scale, complexity, sophistication. "I built and managed production Kubernetes clusters" sounds a hell of a lot better than "I deployed some containers with Swarm."

I get it. I've been that developer. But optimizing for your resume while your startup is trying to find product-market fit is a category error. You're solving the wrong problem at the wrong time.

The mistake everyone makes is conflating "what we'll need at scale" with "what we need right now." Kubernetes offers incredible flexibility and power for managing hundreds of microservices across multiple data centers. Your three-person team has a monolith and a PostgreSQL database. You don't need that flexibility. You need to ship features faster than your competitors.

I once watched a senior engineer spend two weeks setting up cert-manager for automatic SSL certificates in Kubernetes. The same task in Swarm with a simple Traefik container: twenty minutes. Both solutions worked perfectly fine. One consumed 5% of a crucial sprint. The other was done before lunch.

This isn't about Kubernetes being bad. It's about Kubernetes being the wrong tool at the wrong stage. It's buying a Ferrari to go grocery shopping. Sure, it'll get you there, but the insurance costs more than your groceries and you spend half your time worrying about where to park it.

You're Not Signing a 10-Year Infrastructure Lease

The fear that keeps teams reaching for Kubernetes prematurely is lock-in. "If we start with Swarm, we'll be stuck with it forever. Migration will be impossible."

This is just not true.

Your applications are containerized. That's the whole point. The container images that run in Swarm are identical to the ones that run in Kubernetes. You're not writing Swarm-specific code. You're writing Docker containers that happen to be orchestrated by Swarm today.

When you're ready to migrate—when you actually have the scale problems that justify Kubernetes—the transition is mechanical. You're rewriting configuration, not application code. Yes, it's work. No, it's not a rewrite. I've done this migration twice. Both times took less than a month, and we were already handling significant traffic during the switch.

The teams that struggle with migration are usually struggling because their applications are tightly coupled to infrastructure specifics they shouldn't be coupled to anyway. If your app only works in Swarm, you've got bigger problems than orchestration choice.

Think of infrastructure as scaffolding, not foundation. Scaffolding gets replaced as the building grows. That's fine. That's normal. You don't build the scaffolding for a forty-story tower when you're still framing the second floor.

Start simple. Add complexity when you're forced to by actual, measurable problems. "We might need this someday" is not a problem. It's anxiety.

Ship on Swarm. Scale on K8s Later.

Your first orchestration choice is not your last orchestration choice. It's just the one that gets you to production fastest while keeping operational complexity low enough that you can still focus on product.

If you're a two-to-five person team trying to find product-market fit, Swarm gives you everything you need and stays out of your way. Deploy with confidence, iterate quickly, and save the Kubernetes learning curve for when you've proven people want what you're building.

The companies I've seen succeed weren't the ones with the most impressive infrastructure. They were the ones that shipped fast, learned from users, and didn't confuse technical sophistication with progress.

Your investors don't care whether you're running Kubernetes or Swarm. They care whether you're growing. Your users don't care about your orchestration layer. They care whether your product solves their problem. The only person who cares about your orchestration choice at this stage is you—and maybe the engineer who's thinking about their next resume line.

Choose boring technology. Ship the product. If you're lucky enough to have scaling problems later, you'll have the resources to solve them. Right now, you have a different job: prove that anyone wants this thing at all.