Building a Hybrid Docker Orchestrator in Go: The Journey from Single VM to Multi-Node Cluster

What if you could combine the native simplicity of Docker Compose with the decentralized targeting and reliability of HashiCorp Nomad?

Meet Gubernator (or gbnt), a "Goldilocks" container orchestrator written in Go. In this post, I want to share how I took Gubernator from a single-node API to a fully decentralized, multi-node VM cluster with autonomous DNS resolution and local ingress routing—all co-authored alongside Antigravity, Google DeepMind's agentic AI pair programmer.

The Vision: Why Gubernator?

Kubernetes is the undisputed king of container orchestration, but for small-to-medium projects, homelabs, or edge deployments, it represents massive operational overhead. Docker Swarm is simple but lacks fine-grained task scheduling constraints.

Gubernator is designed to fill that sweet spot: