Docker Swarm Still Thriving Three Years after Mirantis Acquisition – Often Running Side-by-Side with Kubernetes

Mirantis announced that three years after acquiring the technology, Docker Swarm is increasingly being used by customers side-by-side with Kubernetes. Mirantis delivers enterprise-grade Swarm – either as a managed service or with enterprise support – through its Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (MKE) product.

“Both Docker Swarm and Kubernetes are container orchestrators so it’s always been thought that as Kubernetes gains adoption, Docker Swarm would fade,” said Ryan Zhang, engineering manager, Mirantis. “But, that is hardly the case. Increasingly, we see our customers running Docker Swarm and Kubernetes side-by-side using MKE to leverage the strengths of each. And so, we will continue to invest in developing Docker Swarm while also contributing back to the open source community.”

More than 100 Mirantis customers utilize Swarm for production workloads, including GlaxoSmithKline, MetLife, Royal Bank of Canada, and S&P Global. This translates to more than 10,000 nodes spread across approximately 1,000 clusters, supporting over 100,000 containers orchestrated by Swarm. Many use the dual-orchestration features of Mirantis Kubernetes Engine to leverage Swarm and Kubernetes side-by-side.

The Mirantis roadmap to support Swarm includes support for the following.

• Swarm Container Storage Interface (CSI) that enables the use of traditional on-premises storage arrays currently being used to run workloads. That is currently going through upstream validation.
• MKE Mandatory Swarm resources constraints that enables administrators to set constraints for process (CPU) and memory limits.
• MKE Swarm Chargebacks for reporting on Swarm clusters usage.

Docker Swarm is an easy-to-use lightweight container orchestrator. Swarm offers a simpler alternative to Kubernetes, and is often used in application deployments that require less complex orchestration and smaller infrastructure overhead.

Mirantis is continuing to develop and maintain Swarm and the components necessary to ensure that it remains the perfect simple alternative-or complement-to Kubernetes, including the following. 

• Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) data security and encryption certification and support
• Regular security validation and updates (typically a 6-week cadence)
• Security integration to enable role-based access control (RBAC) and enterprise authentication
• MKE Image pruning that automates routine maintenance of nodes

Swarm is an integral part of the Mirantis Kubernetes Engine product – delivering customers with choice of both Kubernetes and Swarm orchestrators for their container workload needs. For users who require only Swarm, it provides a Swarm-only mode, but the benefits of dual-orchestration are powerful, and organizations around the world are taking advantage of them.  

Mirantis has a dedicated Swarm development team that focuses solely on improvements to Swarm and continuously rolls out new features, as well as a services and support team of experts ready to assist users with deployments and ongoing maintenance.