I'm looking for those with docker experience to help me wrap my head around moving from development and into production. I would normally throw this type of stuff onto stackoverflow but I find the feedback and insights from our dev.to community being really constructive and useful for others to learn too.

Current situation:

I'm a first-time docker user and I've been working on a side project which I've got running fine in containers and lifted with docker-compose in development as a full stack. Theres a producer app, rabbitmq worker queue, consumer app, caching database and a sql database with a website front end amounting to 6 images. I have registered these within my private gitlab instance and I have a semi-decent setup for keeping my images up to date after changes.

Whenever I dip into the docker documentation it throws out things such as deploying with swarm, compose and machine. I've spent a couple of pain staking days getting docker-machine installed on a private vps to allow remote management since docker docs seem to suggest this is the way to go, however this is where the problems have been endless.

So far docker-machine is completely horrific to work with using the generic driver. I've hit problem after problem and spent a great deal of my time digging through various fixes in their github issues list. I'm not overly confident in whether it's going to run smoothly when my application is eventually deployed so I wanted to double check with the great dev.to community as to the route you typically follow.

At the moment I'm fine running on a single VPS which should hopefully simplify things. In the future, there are workers in my architecture which pull from a worker queue and if I need to scale it would most likely be spinning up more workers to get through the tasks.

As soon as I look outside of the docker documentation I start to read things like.. rancher, kubernetes, portainer etc. I'm not completely sure whether these are relevant or even needed in my case so it would be great to hear some feedback on those too.

Actually just found this .. what a mine field https://landscape.cncf.io/