Docker Swarm mode has been in maintenance mode for at least 5 years now. It's way to late to bet the house on a product that exists pretty much to support people that have bet on it, not to completely pull the rug under their feet.

I introduced Docker Swarm at work in 2018 and already there were rumours that since Kubernetes had won it was just a matter of time until Docker Swarm was fully abandoned.

What's strange is Docker Compose is very slowly resurging. I almost feel like that with a few more primitves (e.g. nodes with tags) and you'd have a much simpler Kubernetes. Which a lot of people might like.

isn't the whole idea of docker compose that it's supposed to be single machine, though?

How likely do you think the introduction of a nodes primitive is given this?

I can see it if it were a strict opt in addition but it feels like it also fundamentally expands the scope of what the tool is.

I agree it would, and I think it's unlikely, but I also think there's a gap between Docker Compose and Kubernetes, and while I know the implementation gap is large, the configuration syntax gap is small. If someone could extend the Compose syntax to include some sort of way to declare what node tags it should/shouldn't run on, and how many, it might be really interesting as a good power for config complexity tradeoff.