A few days DHH (from 37signals) wrote about how they moved off the cloud and how that has helped reduce their costs by a good measure.

Well, earlier today, he announced the first bit of tooling that they used as part of their cloud exit move: Kamal - which is already at version 1.0 and, according to DHH, stable.

I took a quick look at the documentation and it looks to me like an augmented and feature-rich Docker Compose which is, to no surprise, rather opinionated.

I think anyone who’s had experience with the simplicity of Docker Swarm compared to K8s would appreciate Kamal’s way. Hopefully it will turn out to be more reliable than Swarm though.

I found it quite a pragmatic approach to containerising an application suite with the aim of covering a good portion of a the use-cases and requriements of smaller teams.

PS: I may actually try it out in an ongoing personal project instead of Compose or K8s. If I do, I’ll make sure to keep this post, well, posted.