Webinar: How to move from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes without a big-bang cutover

Most teams running Docker Swarm have been running it for years. It works. The people who built it have moved on. The deployment tooling was never documented properly. And every quarter, the migration to Kubernetes gets pushed again, because the risk of touching something that works feels higher than the risk of leaving it alone.

That calculus is inverting. Swarm's ecosystem is shrinking. Kubernetes has become the standard. The longer you wait, the harder it gets and the fewer engineers you'll find who understand your Swarm environment well enough to migrate it safely.

This session walks through what a Swarm to Kubernetes migration actually involves, what most teams underestimate, and how to do it incrementally instead of as a single high-risk cutover.

What we cover

0:00 to 0:10. Why migrations keep getting deferred, and why that changes now. The state of Docker Swarm in the ecosystem and what happens when the gap between your current platform and the industry standard gets too wide to close cleanly.

0:10 to 0:20. Swarm and Kubernetes are architecturally different platforms. Service discovery works differently. Overlay networking works differently. The assumptions your applications make about how containers communicate don't carry across automatically. We walk through how Swarm primitives (stacks, services, secrets, volumes) map to their Kubernetes equivalents and where they don't.

0:20 to 0:45. Live demo. Setting up and managing a Kubernetes environment with Portainer. Installing D2K, an open source translation layer that speaks the Docker and Swarm API and converts deployments to native Kubernetes in real time. Your teams keep deploying the way they do today. Your CI/CD pipelines don't change. Migration happens application by application, at whatever pace makes sense.

0:45 to 0:60. Tooling, migration planning, and Q&A. How CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and other tools that currently talk to your Swarm cluster carry across. What a realistic migration timeline looks like. Open Q&A.

What you walk away with

A clear picture of what a Swarm to Kubernetes migration involves, including the parts that get underestimated. A working understanding of how D2K lets you move incrementally instead of as a big-bang cutover. And a starting point for scoping your own migration with realistic timelines.

Who this is for

Infrastructure and platform engineers running Docker Swarm in production who own or influence the migration decision. DevOps and operations leads responsible for pipelines and tooling tied to the orchestration layer. Engineering managers who need to understand scope and complexity before committing resources. Enterprise architects evaluating modernization risk across their container infrastructure.

Session times

26 May 2026, 1:30 PM Pacific / 2:30 PM Mountain / 3:30 PM Central / 4:30 PM Eastern 27 May 2026, 8:30 AM New Zealand Time