August 20, 2025 • 25 mins
Bret discusses exciting news about Swarm being maintained until 2030.
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In this episode, I give an update on the future of Docker Swarm, the renewed long-term support and ongoing development from Mirantis. The news should be reassuring for you, Swarm users. Swarm remains a viable, supported option for your container orchestration needs, at least until 2030.
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Swarm news: Mirantis maintaining until 2030
Awesome Swarm
Check out the video podcast version here: https://youtu.be/tmQbrCrM-yM
Creators & Guests
- Cristi Cotovan - Editor
- Bret Fisher - Host
- Beth Fisher - Producer
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- (00:00) - Intro
- (00:34) - History of Mirantis and Swarm
- (01:02) - Swarm's Current Status
- (03:44) - Swarm's Long-Term Support
- (08:07) - Swarm's Value Proposition
- (12:25) - Technical Challenges and Solutions
- (17:47) - Looking Ahead: Roadmap and Commitments
- (20:26) - Final Thoughts
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
Hey, it's Brett and thisis DevOps and Docker talk.
in this episode, I have a quick updateon Swarm and it's good news this time
from my weekly live stream on Thursdays.
So.
I hope you enjoy.
I'm gonna talk about Swarm for aminute 'cause I've got some good news.
You Swarm people.
(00:25):
You've been waiting for somegood news and now we have it.
a couple months ago, early2025, there was a release note
that came out from Mirantis.
Oh, and you don't know about Mirantis.
let's catch you up 30 seconds.
Put it on the clock.
Docker back in 2019, soldall their enterprise assets,
majority of the staffall were sold to Mirantis.
(00:45):
Docker decided to go back toits roots and build developer
tooling only, and not focus onorchestration and production servers.
Swarm wasn't sold because it'sopen source, so the copyrights
are still owned by Docker.
Mirantis only took the closed sourcebits, Fast forward six years later,
Mirantis is still supporting Swarm.
They have enterprise customers.
People are paying for support ofSwarm, they've added features,
(01:07):
they've added new storage support,kinda like with Kubernetes CSI
and that's kind of rolling along.
It's not as awesome and as big.
It's a 1.0 release.
there have been things thathave happened to swarm.
So people have been looking for thebig sign of, can I rely on swarm?
And earlier this year there was asign that was the opposite of that.
(01:28):
Portainer pointed out that they foundin the recent morant release notes,
particular words that implied or ifyou tried to read the tea leaves,
they kind of suggested people.
Would no longer be getting swarmupdates in the paid enterprise portal
orchestrator thing, and that it wasonly gonna be Kubernetes going forward.
(01:51):
so Portainer, another company thatcan manage Kubernetes and Swarm
was calling attention to theserelease notes and asking questions
that no one had answers to.
I did a video on that.
it was called Is Swarm, end of Life.
I read through this,tried to interpret it.
I reached out to Mirantis talkedto Docker maintainers, Mirantis
maintainers, swarm maintainers, peoplein charge of Mirantis, people in charge
(02:14):
of product, and tried to figure outwhat was going on and everything.
I heard everything frominternal to Docker to internal.
Was the message that Swarm is fine.
Swarm works.
We will, we're still supporting it.
It ships with every version of Docker.
with every version of Mirantisruntime, and we still all like it.
(02:38):
We're not expanding it'sfunctionality at a rapid pace.
It's not a majority of revenue ofthe businesses anymore, so it's not
dead, but nobody believed that itwas gonna be pulled, pulled out.
In fact, I think some of paraphrasingquotes were things like a maintainer
(02:58):
saying, there's really no reason for usto pull out swarm out of Docker engine.
It would be a lot of work to do that.
Then we would have to declare toeveryone that this is no longer there.
It would be a whole bunch of workfor not really any benefit because
they still patch all the code.
They still have to maintainany cvs that show up.
swarm kit, the library, and thenthere's networking libraries and the
(03:21):
things that come into Docker engineto maintain swarm and then some of the
great swarm community we have in Discord.
We're pointing out that there's been somechallenges lately with DNS and networking
and it looks like that's getting.
Uh, fixed.
And then yesterday I noticed a brandnew post, which is even more good news.
(03:44):
So over at Mirantis about everyyear they post they're going
to keep maintaining swarm.
Basically a commitment to say, HeySwarm fans, we hear you we're still
taking support money from you.
We're, in fact, I've heard from peoplethat pay Mirantis for support and
they're, they're both fine with Swarm.
(04:05):
Happy to use Swarm in certain occasions.
They might also have Kubernetes andother occasions still using Swarm.
They're happy to pay Mirantis supportfor it to have enterprise support.
they get on the phone with Mirantis.
They talk about good that they have goodsupport, they feel confident in it, but
they also are reading tea leaves and wantto be certain that the future of Swarm,
at least as far out as we can all see,is going to be maintained or supportable.
(04:29):
And, nobody is expectingpromises of future features.
People just wanna make sure this thingis gonna still work in two years.
So we created a GitHub repoawesome list a few years back.
I keep track of all the news.
the last time we've heard anythingfrom Mirantis is I think in 2024.
So it's been six months and Mirantis tendsto go six months or a year in the last
(04:54):
five years before announcing, Hey, just areminder, we're still maintaining swarm.
We still think it's great.
So they've got another post as ofyesterday, and this is a pretty good
one because they're announcing fivemore years of support for swarm.
So I think when they first did this inI'm trying to remember, For the next three
(05:16):
years, for at least the next three years.
This was in 2022, so thatwould be three more years.
That's now April, 2025 butthey posted on July 1st.
Swarm container orchestration issimple, powerful, and compatible
with tooling and workload.
Developers know in their bones.
Mirantis will support Swarm onits Mirantis Kubernetes Engine
(05:36):
dual Orchestrator Kubernetesplus Swarm platform through 2030.
So we now have five and a half yearsof promised support for Enterprise
Swarm, which implies that the opensource swarm that most of us use
(05:56):
in Docker So the Docker engine isopen source and it's all upstream.
Docker engine's upstream from Mirantis.
Mirantis is probably, upstream fromthe Mirantis Kubernetes engine.
this particular product, this one whereit's the combo of Kubernetes and Swarm,
that's the same core product that Iunderstand that came out of Docker
(06:17):
data center and Docker Enterprise.
They renamed it a couple times.
That goes all the wayback to like 20 15, 20 16.
And I was one of the early beta deployersof Docker data center let's keep going.
Swarm continues to offer apowerful value proposition for
organizations That need simplicity,speed, and operational efficiency.
(06:37):
In container orchestration.
It enables teams to move fast, deploy withconfidence and maintain uptime without the
complexity of managing Kubernetes controlplanes or custom resource definitions.
That's why we're making along-term commitment to Mirantis
Kubernetes engine version three.
That was the version that was inquestion at the beginning of the year.
So it, so me and others provided feedbackto Mirantis saying, Hey, your naming is
(07:00):
kind of confusing 'cause you've releasedthis new version four of MKE and you're
saying version three, which we all wouldassume is now deprecated or archived.
but that turned out tonot really be the case.
It was sort of a namingchallenge for them.
And version three isgoing to be maintained.
So version three is our flagshipcontainer orchestration platform.
(07:24):
Swarm will be fully supportedthrough at least 2030.
And Mirantis will continue toprovide first class support for
both Kubernetes and Docker Swarm.
Why Swarm still matters.
MKE three is the most scalable, reliable,and secure platform on the market for
orchestrate container workloads on bothKubernetes and Swarm in a single solution.
It's trusted by hundreds ofcustomers worldwide to power their
(07:45):
mission critical infrastructurefrom cloud native microservices
to distributed edge deployments.
when Docker sold to Mirantis, there wasa belief that it was around 700 customers
of Swarm or of Docker data center thatthey were moving over to Mirantis.
I'm just noticing theydidn't say thousands.
Doesn't sound like they've10 x the business yet.
(08:06):
We continue to see widespread adoptionof swarm across verticals like
manufacturing, financial services, energyand defense, especially in environments
where operational predictability andlow overhead are non-negotiable, meaning
developers using Docker also preferSwarm to enable a simple, seamless
workflow from desktop to production.
For these use cases, swarm remains avital tool in container orchestration
(08:26):
Additionally, MKE three featuresboth FIPs one 40 dash two validated
encryption and the DSA Stig compliance.
And we continue to get new inquiriesfrom US federal agencies as
well as organizations and otherhighly regulated industries.
This is actually true.
Going all the way back to 2019, 2017,I would go to Docker's Federal Summit,
(08:47):
in Washington DC or the DC metro area.
we'd get a lot of federal agenciesfrom the US interested in Docker.
This was early days, right?
2017. These, this was back whenKubernetes and production was still.
You were, you were still very leadingedge the agencies were trying to figure
out how to use orchestration becausethey were really liking Docker, but they
needed something to handle many servers.
(09:08):
And so their problem was, is at thetime, Kubernetes wasn't yet approved
for most government agencies.
the Kubernetes ecosystem hadn't maturedto the point that there was all these
different official vendors with stableproducts that they felt reli, but they
had approved for, for Docker engine.
And so the Docker engine wasinside of these servers, already
in these government agencies.
(09:29):
And so those of us that were likeof several of us that were captains
who were fans of Swarm, would goaround in the conference and say,
Hey, um, I know you, you don't getto have Kubernetes yet, but, but you
actually already have an orchestrator.
It's actually built into Docker engine.
All you gotta do is Docker swarm,a knit, and boom, you can do.
70% of what Kubernetes could do at thetime it was early days, but we were
(09:52):
excited to like sneak it in throughthe back door because they just really
wanted to solve problems with containersand they were just feeling limited
by their purchase decisions and theirapproval decisions and they had Docker.
So Mirantis in this 2025 document isconfirming that that's still the case.
there are still occasions where addingall these different products to Kubernetes
(10:15):
isn't necessary when you're maybeusing it on manufacturing equipment
and you maybe do something very simple.
I've heard that from Port Taner whohas enterprise customers, machine,
transportation customers, stuff like that.
And they're confirming that there areuse cases where Kubernetes is still too
heavyweight, still too many hardwarerequirements and complexity requirements.
And they just need, essentially, like whatSwarm is a single binary that runs the
(10:38):
container, engine, runs the orchestrationengine, runs the secret storage database,
maintains all the networking connectionsand the DNS all in a single binary.
now this is interesting 'causethis is looking ahead and I wanted
to know some of my biggest issueswith swarm and beefs with swarm,
haven't necessarily been addressed.
(11:00):
I'm always hoping thatMirantis will address them.
One of them is the YAML bifurcation ofthe YAML speck between compose and swarm.
And they're getting farther apart.
And it's unfortunate because originallythe whole idea was that the YAML spec used
for compose will also be usable in swarm.
And that's no longer the case.
which is fine from, an enterprisedeployment perspective because we weren't
(11:23):
really using compose files locally andthen just throwing those into a cluster
and production, they were usuallydifferent files, but at least the spec
and the functionality was very similar.
So we didn't have to learn two standards.
I guess that's the problem.
And then my other beef with that is thatstandard hasn't really moved forward.
So we still don't have a swarmAPI to talk directly to a stack.
(11:44):
Which is essentiallywhat Kubernetes YAML is.
It's a stack of different resourcesthat you can shove into one thing
and deploy all at the same time.
Well, we don't technicallyhave that on the swarm API yet.
I keep asking for it.
I keep hoping, but, um, you know,it's open source, so PRs are welcome.
So, stateful workflows with CSI supportto extend swarms utility, we've invested
(12:05):
in support for the container storageinterface, or CSI with MKE three.
This enables swarm users to runstateful workflows like databases, data
pipelines, and AI inference serverswith persistent storage backends by
enterprise grade systems with CSI support.
You don't need to switch to Kubernetesjust to gain storage orchestration.
Swarm users can now run modern data heavyapplications with the same simplicity
(12:27):
and resilience they've always counted on.
I wanna pause on CSI for a secondbecause it turns out that this maybe is
a little bit more hand wavy marketing
For this new CSI functionalityand swarm to be taken advantage of
CSI, providers or storage providershave to update their drivers, to
(12:48):
work with Docker Engine and Swarm.
And as far as I know, most of themhave not done that, but we are
trying, we meeting the community.
So if you know of anything, please throwin an issue or a PR the whole goal, by
the way, of this awesome swarm list onGitHub is to track what currently works
and is still supported because there'sa decade of swarm stuff out there.
(13:12):
We even had a version of swarm beforeswarm called Swarm Classic, and
that's not really the same thing.
It was a bolt-on, add-on to Docker engine.
It's not been supported in a long time,but it's not compatible with, with
what we called swarm mode or now justswarm and all of these things, you
know, have cycles and, and companiescame in and built stuff for swarm.
(13:34):
And then when Kubernetes wonin the popularity contest, they
removed their swarm support.
So things broke over timethat we thought were working.
I've tried to maintain this,This warm, awesome list.
And not just news, but also officialsources of documentation, places to
go for questions and answers and chat.
my Discord server, and placeswhere you can find tooling that
(13:58):
still works for cluster management.
We've got extra on topfunctionality, gooeys and the like.
And then we come to the CSI support.
the community's really helped herein finding all the different things
that you would maybe want to usefor storage and finding out if they
have updated their tool for Swarm.
most vendors are not payingattention to Swarm anymore.
(14:20):
we've gotta tell them we would loveto use their storage, but they've
gotta support Swarm and Docker engine.
that's slowly happening over the lastfew years as CSI was officially added.
It was added in 2023.
So it's been a couple of years and there'sbeen some progress, but I wouldn't say
you can assume that everything just works.
I'm very curious to see how peopleare doing this in production
(14:40):
and how they're trying to useCSI in production with Swarm.
I've only had a few people comeback to me and give me, stories
around what works and what doesn'tfor them or what they're using.
To be fair, for years now, ever sincelike 2019, 2018, I've generally been
telling people if you need to supportvolumes in swarm, that move across node,
(15:02):
that's when you need to go to Kubernetes.
because that was a rough area.
And to watch people struggle throughit, trying to get swarm to work with
moving database files from one nodeto another, it just, didn't work well.
There was old open source pluginslike, Rex Ray that were slowly
degraded over time because theywere archived and not maintained.
(15:23):
so I've generally just did not feltcomfortable advising people that they
should go to production with Swarm if theyneed volume support that is cross node.
in those cases, usually what I tellpeople is if you have to run databases
or anything with volume storage,then you're just gonna have to pin
that storage to a particular node.
And you just have to know that when thatnode goes down, you lose the storage.
Which means if you're running databases,you need to run the traditional
(15:44):
database mirror and just treat thatlike an old school database mirror
where they are pinned to nodes.
The rest of your apps can all run andmove around as nodes fail, but, these
two database nodes are very special.
my general recommendation is if you're inthe cloud, just use the cloud databases
and then use swarm for all of your,all of your non persistent data needs.
(16:07):
And here we are, right?
The last little bit I'm going toread is the fun looking ahead.
looking ahead, we're not just maintainingMKE three, we're investing in it with
a roadmap that stretches through 2030.
I'd love to see that roadmap.
Can we have that roadmap?
If it's open source, we can atleast have the open source roadmap.
(16:28):
I think that would give people a lotof confidence that not just, oh yeah,
it'll be maintained if you pay us.
But also, hey, look, there's actuallysome things in swarm open source that
we're working on, like fixing thenetworking adding API support for stacks
or improving the CSI support becauseoriginally when it first released two
years ago, I was told by maintainers aat least one maintainer, that this is
(16:52):
kind of like a beta 1.0 trial thing.
we need to put more into it.
So where is that?
what's happening with that?
I'd love to see some status on that.
with a roadmap that stretches through 2030Mirantis is giving customers the long-term
stability and strategic flexibility theyneed to build confidently with swarm.
We've needed that confidence for a decade.
Docker has never had aswarm page on their website.
(17:15):
It's only mentioned in thedocs, never on the website.
At least Mirantis has a swarm pagewhether you're deploying at the
edge in the data center or acrossmulti-cloud environments, MKE three
lets you choose the right orchestratorfor the job without compromise.
a lot of marketing fluff in there, butessentially the key takeaway is they have
committed to five and a half more yearsof support, and they have stated publicly
(17:38):
that they have swarm features coming.
We will have to hope that thoseswarm features are still in the
open source, to my knowledge.
Almost always is true.
Like I'm actually having a hardtime coming up with anything other
than compliance, military governmentcompliance stuff that isn't in
ducker engine's swarm, open source.
(17:58):
Right?
So we have to kind of assume, I wouldassume at this point that if any features
or added to swarm, including improvementsto CSI, it would still roll upstream
to Docker engine, which means all of usswarm open source people are gonna benefit
from the people paying mirantis for swarmsupport, which is one of the best ways
(18:20):
we got to maintain open source in thein the world, is people pay for support.
That support money drives innovation inthe open source product, which goes back
to people using it who then want support.
And that way has worked for a long time.
Red Hat was built on it.
Ubuntu, I mean, all the majordistributions, all the major
(18:40):
Kubernetes distributions, includingRed Hats and ranchers and everyone
else, they're all, they're allbuilt on that model of paid support.
primarily open source.
So, yay, we can celebrateif you're a swarm user.
I now am changing my opinion fromfour months ago, three months ago,
(19:00):
If Swarm works for you, keep doing it.
You have my permission.
Not that you needed it,but you now have it.
if you don't wanna use swarm.
Totally fine.
I'm not advocating for swarm everywhere.
I don't run swarm anymore becauseI'm just one person and I don't wanna
maintain servers and patched oss andreboot servers and replace, instances.
(19:25):
I just don't.
So I use all the cloud stuff, where Ican just run a one line command or throw
in my container environment variablesand have it run containers natively.
Google Cloud run, Amazon, let's see,AWS's, 18 ways to run containers.
Like there's all these other ways torun containers that don't require me to
Maintain those servers, patchthose servers, secure those
(19:48):
servers, monitor those servers.
There's so many other ways of higherlevel abstraction that I do that, but it
doesn't mean that everyone has to do that.
And it doesn't solve on-prem problems oredge cases where you don't have those.
if you have very minimal needs andyou don't need the complexity of
Kubernetes, like Swarm is back.
Swarm is back, baby.
It's back.
(20:08):
This is the best we've ever had it.
We have a swarm page.
We have an actual swarm homepage.
Docker never committed to fiveyears of maintaining swarm.
Docker never stated publicly thatthey even care about Swarm other
than the original announcementand the paid enterprise products
that they had up until 2019.
But ever since 2019, I've neverheard a Docker employee state
(20:30):
anything publicly about Swarmother than the fact that it exists.
they'll confirm that it exists,but we've never gotten certainty.
We've never gotten commitmentfrom Docker, and that's all
that people were asking for.
they were just asking, Hey, if Ideploy this open source and yes,
it's free, Is there some indicationthat it will still exist and not be
archived as a project in six months?
And I think we have it like this isthe best scenario and we might be past
(20:56):
the peak Kubernetes hype cycle, right?
Some people are in that trough ofdisillusionment or whatever people have
figured out swarm and Kubernetes and theyfigured out that maybe they don't need it
all the time, or maybe they could do both.
Maybe swarm is so simple that in somecases I just don't deploy Kubernetes.
Maybe I deploy some swarmand there's no shade here.
I'm not hating on anyproduct or any open source.
(21:16):
this is all best effort.
But Mirantis has given us thatlevel of certainty that we never
really had with Docker, and Ireally appreciate that of them.
So what do I know in addition to thosefacts, I now have multiple people inside
of Docker and Mirantis, the companiesthat work around swarm or related to
swarm, and they're all interested in it.
(21:36):
They're all curious aboutthe community feedback.
So if you have contracts with anyof these companies, let them know
that you're interested in Swarm.
Even if you're not running it,just tell 'em, Hey, we're always
curious whether Swarm has addedmore functionality to solve problems
so that we don't need Kubernetes.
Wouldn't it be wild if a decade afterSwarm was released and after Kubernetes
(22:00):
rose to prominence that we all kindof looked at Kubernetes and went,
yeah, that's really cool and it doesreally cool things, but, now that, you
know, maybe there's budget cuts and AIchanges, some things maybe I don't need,
All this complexity and maybesome of the things I do, I can get
away with simpler stuff then weend up having a swarm resurgence.
If you don't know the history ofSwarm with me and the relationship
(22:21):
I have with it, I have twocourses that Teach Swarm on Udemy.
So you can, in this video, youcan go down this description,
there's a link to my courses.
You can buy either my DockerMastery course, which also teaches
swarm or the swarm course, whichhas a full swarm, walkthrough.
it's many hours of swarm.
I've been a big fan of it forspecific simple use cases.
(22:43):
I've run it myself in productionon the internet for years.
I've helped many companiesdeploy it over the years.
Even the Old Swarm Classic, Ihelped a couple of companies
deploy that before the swarm, themodern swarm came out swarm mode.
So I've always been a fan of it forpeople that have simple uses I'm excited
to see that there's a team willing togo out there on the internet and say,
(23:05):
If you pay us, we will still support you.
And we are still investingin this open source project.
I'm so happy that we have some clarityon this and that there's a company
willing to step out there, especiallyconsidering all this AI shakeup,
So I think a lot of vendors are justscared to commit to anything because
who knows where they're gonna be in 12months, maybe all this stuff is irrelevant
(23:25):
and AI DevOps becomes a thing and the AIwill just run all the Kubernetes for us.
So we don't need other alternativesbecause the AI knows Kubernetes so well
that it makes all the hard things simpler.
I don't know that it's gonnasolve the resource problem,
but But you know, we can hope.
Thanks for listening.
And I'll see you in the next episode.
Hey, it's Brett and thisis DevOps and Docker talk.
in this episode, I have a quick updateon Swarm and it's good news this time
from my weekly live stream on Thursdays.
So.
I hope you enjoy.
I'm gonna talk about Swarm for aminute 'cause I've got some good news.
You Swarm people.
(00:25):
You've been waiting for somegood news and now we have it.
a couple months ago, early2025, there was a release note
that came out from Mirantis.
Oh, and you don't know about Mirantis.
let's catch you up 30 seconds.
Put it on the clock.
Docker back in 2019, soldall their enterprise assets,
majority of the staffall were sold to Mirantis.
(00:45):
Docker decided to go back toits roots and build developer
tooling only, and not focus onorchestration and production servers.
Swarm wasn't sold because it'sopen source, so the copyrights
are still owned by Docker.
Mirantis only took the closed sourcebits, Fast forward six years later,
Mirantis is still supporting Swarm.
They have enterprise customers.
People are paying for support ofSwarm, they've added features,
(01:07):
they've added new storage support,kinda like with Kubernetes CSI
and that's kind of rolling along.
It's not as awesome and as big.
It's a 1.0 release.
there have been things thathave happened to swarm.
So people have been looking for thebig sign of, can I rely on swarm?
And earlier this year there was asign that was the opposite of that.
(01:28):
Portainer pointed out that they foundin the recent morant release notes,
particular words that implied or ifyou tried to read the tea leaves,
they kind of suggested people.
Would no longer be getting swarmupdates in the paid enterprise portal
orchestrator thing, and that it wasonly gonna be Kubernetes going forward.
(01:51):
so Portainer, another company thatcan manage Kubernetes and Swarm
was calling attention to theserelease notes and asking questions
that no one had answers to.
I did a video on that.
it was called Is Swarm, end of Life.
I read through this,tried to interpret it.
I reached out to Mirantis talkedto Docker maintainers, Mirantis
maintainers, swarm maintainers, peoplein charge of Mirantis, people in charge
(02:14):
of product, and tried to figure outwhat was going on and everything.
I heard everything frominternal to Docker to internal.
Was the message that Swarm is fine.
Swarm works.
We will, we're still supporting it.
It ships with every version of Docker.
with every version of Mirantisruntime, and we still all like it.
(02:38):
We're not expanding it'sfunctionality at a rapid pace.
It's not a majority of revenue ofthe businesses anymore, so it's not
dead, but nobody believed that itwas gonna be pulled, pulled out.
In fact, I think some of paraphrasingquotes were things like a maintainer
(02:58):
saying, there's really no reason for usto pull out swarm out of Docker engine.
It would be a lot of work to do that.
Then we would have to declare toeveryone that this is no longer there.
It would be a whole bunch of workfor not really any benefit because
they still patch all the code.
They still have to maintainany cvs that show up.
swarm kit, the library, and thenthere's networking libraries and the
(03:21):
things that come into Docker engineto maintain swarm and then some of the
great swarm community we have in Discord.
We're pointing out that there's been somechallenges lately with DNS and networking
and it looks like that's getting.
Uh, fixed.
And then yesterday I noticed a brandnew post, which is even more good news.
(03:44):
So over at Mirantis about everyyear they post they're going
to keep maintaining swarm.
Basically a commitment to say, HeySwarm fans, we hear you we're still
taking support money from you.
We're, in fact, I've heard from peoplethat pay Mirantis for support and
they're, they're both fine with Swarm.
(04:05):
Happy to use Swarm in certain occasions.
They might also have Kubernetes andother occasions still using Swarm.
They're happy to pay Mirantis supportfor it to have enterprise support.
they get on the phone with Mirantis.
They talk about good that they have goodsupport, they feel confident in it, but
they also are reading tea leaves and wantto be certain that the future of Swarm,
at least as far out as we can all see,is going to be maintained or supportable.
(04:29):
And, nobody is expectingpromises of future features.
People just wanna make sure this thingis gonna still work in two years.
So we created a GitHub repoawesome list a few years back.
I keep track of all the news.
the last time we've heard anythingfrom Mirantis is I think in 2024.
So it's been six months and Mirantis tendsto go six months or a year in the last
(04:54):
five years before announcing, Hey, just areminder, we're still maintaining swarm.
We still think it's great.
So they've got another post as ofyesterday, and this is a pretty good
one because they're announcing fivemore years of support for swarm.
So I think when they first did this inI'm trying to remember, For the next three
(05:16):
years, for at least the next three years.
This was in 2022, so thatwould be three more years.
That's now April, 2025 butthey posted on July 1st.
Swarm container orchestration issimple, powerful, and compatible
with tooling and workload.
Developers know in their bones.
Mirantis will support Swarm onits Mirantis Kubernetes Engine
(05:36):
dual Orchestrator Kubernetesplus Swarm platform through 2030.
So we now have five and a half yearsof promised support for Enterprise
Swarm, which implies that the opensource swarm that most of us use
(05:56):
in Docker So the Docker engine isopen source and it's all upstream.
Docker engine's upstream from Mirantis.
Mirantis is probably, upstream fromthe Mirantis Kubernetes engine.
this particular product, this one whereit's the combo of Kubernetes and Swarm,
that's the same core product that Iunderstand that came out of Docker
(06:17):
data center and Docker Enterprise.
They renamed it a couple times.
That goes all the wayback to like 20 15, 20 16.
And I was one of the early beta deployersof Docker data center let's keep going.
Swarm continues to offer apowerful value proposition for
organizations That need simplicity,speed, and operational efficiency.
(06:37):
In container orchestration.
It enables teams to move fast, deploy withconfidence and maintain uptime without the
complexity of managing Kubernetes controlplanes or custom resource definitions.
That's why we're making along-term commitment to Mirantis
Kubernetes engine version three.
That was the version that was inquestion at the beginning of the year.
So it, so me and others provided feedbackto Mirantis saying, Hey, your naming is
(07:00):
kind of confusing 'cause you've releasedthis new version four of MKE and you're
saying version three, which we all wouldassume is now deprecated or archived.
but that turned out tonot really be the case.
It was sort of a namingchallenge for them.
And version three isgoing to be maintained.
So version three is our flagshipcontainer orchestration platform.
(07:24):
Swarm will be fully supportedthrough at least 2030.
And Mirantis will continue toprovide first class support for
both Kubernetes and Docker Swarm.
Why Swarm still matters.
MKE three is the most scalable, reliable,and secure platform on the market for
orchestrate container workloads on bothKubernetes and Swarm in a single solution.
It's trusted by hundreds ofcustomers worldwide to power their
(07:45):
mission critical infrastructurefrom cloud native microservices
to distributed edge deployments.
when Docker sold to Mirantis, there wasa belief that it was around 700 customers
of Swarm or of Docker data center thatthey were moving over to Mirantis.
I'm just noticing theydidn't say thousands.
Doesn't sound like they've10 x the business yet.
(08:06):
We continue to see widespread adoptionof swarm across verticals like
manufacturing, financial services, energyand defense, especially in environments
where operational predictability andlow overhead are non-negotiable, meaning
developers using Docker also preferSwarm to enable a simple, seamless
workflow from desktop to production.
For these use cases, swarm remains avital tool in container orchestration
(08:26):
Additionally, MKE three featuresboth FIPs one 40 dash two validated
encryption and the DSA Stig compliance.
And we continue to get new inquiriesfrom US federal agencies as
well as organizations and otherhighly regulated industries.
This is actually true.
Going all the way back to 2019, 2017,I would go to Docker's Federal Summit,
(08:47):
in Washington DC or the DC metro area.
we'd get a lot of federal agenciesfrom the US interested in Docker.
This was early days, right?
2017. These, this was back whenKubernetes and production was still.
You were, you were still very leadingedge the agencies were trying to figure
out how to use orchestration becausethey were really liking Docker, but they
needed something to handle many servers.
(09:08):
And so their problem was, is at thetime, Kubernetes wasn't yet approved
for most government agencies.
the Kubernetes ecosystem hadn't maturedto the point that there was all these
different official vendors with stableproducts that they felt reli, but they
had approved for, for Docker engine.
And so the Docker engine wasinside of these servers, already
in these government agencies.
(09:29):
And so those of us that were likeof several of us that were captains
who were fans of Swarm, would goaround in the conference and say,
Hey, um, I know you, you don't getto have Kubernetes yet, but, but you
actually already have an orchestrator.
It's actually built into Docker engine.
All you gotta do is Docker swarm,a knit, and boom, you can do.
70% of what Kubernetes could do at thetime it was early days, but we were
(09:52):
excited to like sneak it in throughthe back door because they just really
wanted to solve problems with containersand they were just feeling limited
by their purchase decisions and theirapproval decisions and they had Docker.
So Mirantis in this 2025 document isconfirming that that's still the case.
there are still occasions where addingall these different products to Kubernetes
(10:15):
isn't necessary when you're maybeusing it on manufacturing equipment
and you maybe do something very simple.
I've heard that from Port Taner whohas enterprise customers, machine,
transportation customers, stuff like that.
And they're confirming that there areuse cases where Kubernetes is still too
heavyweight, still too many hardwarerequirements and complexity requirements.
And they just need, essentially, like whatSwarm is a single binary that runs the
(10:38):
container, engine, runs the orchestrationengine, runs the secret storage database,
maintains all the networking connectionsand the DNS all in a single binary.
now this is interesting 'causethis is looking ahead and I wanted
to know some of my biggest issueswith swarm and beefs with swarm,
haven't necessarily been addressed.
(11:00):
I'm always hoping thatMirantis will address them.
One of them is the YAML bifurcation ofthe YAML speck between compose and swarm.
And they're getting farther apart.
And it's unfortunate because originallythe whole idea was that the YAML spec used
for compose will also be usable in swarm.
And that's no longer the case.
which is fine from, an enterprisedeployment perspective because we weren't
(11:23):
really using compose files locally andthen just throwing those into a cluster
and production, they were usuallydifferent files, but at least the spec
and the functionality was very similar.
So we didn't have to learn two standards.
I guess that's the problem.
And then my other beef with that is thatstandard hasn't really moved forward.
So we still don't have a swarmAPI to talk directly to a stack.
(11:44):
Which is essentiallywhat Kubernetes YAML is.
It's a stack of different resourcesthat you can shove into one thing
and deploy all at the same time.
Well, we don't technicallyhave that on the swarm API yet.
I keep asking for it.
I keep hoping, but, um, you know,it's open source, so PRs are welcome.
So, stateful workflows with CSI supportto extend swarms utility, we've invested
(12:05):
in support for the container storageinterface, or CSI with MKE three.
This enables swarm users to runstateful workflows like databases, data
pipelines, and AI inference serverswith persistent storage backends by
enterprise grade systems with CSI support.
You don't need to switch to Kubernetesjust to gain storage orchestration.
Swarm users can now run modern data heavyapplications with the same simplicity
(12:27):
and resilience they've always counted on.
I wanna pause on CSI for a secondbecause it turns out that this maybe is
a little bit more hand wavy marketing
For this new CSI functionalityand swarm to be taken advantage of
CSI, providers or storage providershave to update their drivers, to
(12:48):
work with Docker Engine and Swarm.
And as far as I know, most of themhave not done that, but we are
trying, we meeting the community.
So if you know of anything, please throwin an issue or a PR the whole goal, by
the way, of this awesome swarm list onGitHub is to track what currently works
and is still supported because there'sa decade of swarm stuff out there.
(13:12):
We even had a version of swarm beforeswarm called Swarm Classic, and
that's not really the same thing.
It was a bolt-on, add-on to Docker engine.
It's not been supported in a long time,but it's not compatible with, with
what we called swarm mode or now justswarm and all of these things, you
know, have cycles and, and companiescame in and built stuff for swarm.
(13:34):
And then when Kubernetes wonin the popularity contest, they
removed their swarm support.
So things broke over timethat we thought were working.
I've tried to maintain this,This warm, awesome list.
And not just news, but also officialsources of documentation, places to
go for questions and answers and chat.
my Discord server, and placeswhere you can find tooling that
(13:58):
still works for cluster management.
We've got extra on topfunctionality, gooeys and the like.
And then we come to the CSI support.
the community's really helped herein finding all the different things
that you would maybe want to usefor storage and finding out if they
have updated their tool for Swarm.
most vendors are not payingattention to Swarm anymore.
(14:20):
we've gotta tell them we would loveto use their storage, but they've
gotta support Swarm and Docker engine.
that's slowly happening over the lastfew years as CSI was officially added.
It was added in 2023.
So it's been a couple of years and there'sbeen some progress, but I wouldn't say
you can assume that everything just works.
I'm very curious to see how peopleare doing this in production
(14:40):
and how they're trying to useCSI in production with Swarm.
I've only had a few people comeback to me and give me, stories
around what works and what doesn'tfor them or what they're using.
To be fair, for years now, ever sincelike 2019, 2018, I've generally been
telling people if you need to supportvolumes in swarm, that move across node,
(15:02):
that's when you need to go to Kubernetes.
because that was a rough area.
And to watch people struggle throughit, trying to get swarm to work with
moving database files from one nodeto another, it just, didn't work well.
There was old open source pluginslike, Rex Ray that were slowly
degraded over time because theywere archived and not maintained.
(15:23):
so I've generally just did not feltcomfortable advising people that they
should go to production with Swarm if theyneed volume support that is cross node.
in those cases, usually what I tellpeople is if you have to run databases
or anything with volume storage,then you're just gonna have to pin
that storage to a particular node.
And you just have to know that when thatnode goes down, you lose the storage.
Which means if you're running databases,you need to run the traditional
(15:44):
database mirror and just treat thatlike an old school database mirror
where they are pinned to nodes.
The rest of your apps can all run andmove around as nodes fail, but, these
two database nodes are very special.
my general recommendation is if you're inthe cloud, just use the cloud databases
and then use swarm for all of your,all of your non persistent data needs.
(16:07):
And here we are, right?
The last little bit I'm going toread is the fun looking ahead.
looking ahead, we're not just maintainingMKE three, we're investing in it with
a roadmap that stretches through 2030.
I'd love to see that roadmap.
Can we have that roadmap?
If it's open source, we can atleast have the open source roadmap.
(16:28):
I think that would give people a lotof confidence that not just, oh yeah,
it'll be maintained if you pay us.
But also, hey, look, there's actuallysome things in swarm open source that
we're working on, like fixing thenetworking adding API support for stacks
or improving the CSI support becauseoriginally when it first released two
years ago, I was told by maintainers aat least one maintainer, that this is
(16:52):
kind of like a beta 1.0 trial thing.
we need to put more into it.
So where is that?
what's happening with that?
I'd love to see some status on that.
with a roadmap that stretches through 2030Mirantis is giving customers the long-term
stability and strategic flexibility theyneed to build confidently with swarm.
We've needed that confidence for a decade.
Docker has never had aswarm page on their website.
(17:15):
It's only mentioned in thedocs, never on the website.
At least Mirantis has a swarm pagewhether you're deploying at the
edge in the data center or acrossmulti-cloud environments, MKE three
lets you choose the right orchestratorfor the job without compromise.
a lot of marketing fluff in there, butessentially the key takeaway is they have
committed to five and a half more yearsof support, and they have stated publicly
(17:38):
that they have swarm features coming.
We will have to hope that thoseswarm features are still in the
open source, to my knowledge.
Almost always is true.
Like I'm actually having a hardtime coming up with anything other
than compliance, military governmentcompliance stuff that isn't in
ducker engine's swarm, open source.
(17:58):
Right?
So we have to kind of assume, I wouldassume at this point that if any features
or added to swarm, including improvementsto CSI, it would still roll upstream
to Docker engine, which means all of usswarm open source people are gonna benefit
from the people paying mirantis for swarmsupport, which is one of the best ways
(18:20):
we got to maintain open source in thein the world, is people pay for support.
That support money drives innovation inthe open source product, which goes back
to people using it who then want support.
And that way has worked for a long time.
Red Hat was built on it.
Ubuntu, I mean, all the majordistributions, all the major
(18:40):
Kubernetes distributions, includingRed Hats and ranchers and everyone
else, they're all, they're allbuilt on that model of paid support.
primarily open source.
So, yay, we can celebrateif you're a swarm user.
I now am changing my opinion fromfour months ago, three months ago,
(19:00):
If Swarm works for you, keep doing it.
You have my permission.
Not that you needed it,but you now have it.
if you don't wanna use swarm.
Totally fine.
I'm not advocating for swarm everywhere.
I don't run swarm anymore becauseI'm just one person and I don't wanna
maintain servers and patched oss andreboot servers and replace, instances.
(19:25):
I just don't.
So I use all the cloud stuff, where Ican just run a one line command or throw
in my container environment variablesand have it run containers natively.
Google Cloud run, Amazon, let's see,AWS's, 18 ways to run containers.
Like there's all these other ways torun containers that don't require me to
Maintain those servers, patchthose servers, secure those
(19:48):
servers, monitor those servers.
There's so many other ways of higherlevel abstraction that I do that, but it
doesn't mean that everyone has to do that.
And it doesn't solve on-prem problems oredge cases where you don't have those.
if you have very minimal needs andyou don't need the complexity of
Kubernetes, like Swarm is back.
Swarm is back, baby.
It's back.
(20:08):
This is the best we've ever had it.
We have a swarm page.
We have an actual swarm homepage.
Docker never committed to fiveyears of maintaining swarm.
Docker never stated publicly thatthey even care about Swarm other
than the original announcementand the paid enterprise products
that they had up until 2019.
But ever since 2019, I've neverheard a Docker employee state
(20:30):
anything publicly about Swarmother than the fact that it exists.
they'll confirm that it exists,but we've never gotten certainty.
We've never gotten commitmentfrom Docker, and that's all
that people were asking for.
they were just asking, Hey, if Ideploy this open source and yes,
it's free, Is there some indicationthat it will still exist and not be
archived as a project in six months?
And I think we have it like this isthe best scenario and we might be past
(20:56):
the peak Kubernetes hype cycle, right?
Some people are in that trough ofdisillusionment or whatever people have
figured out swarm and Kubernetes and theyfigured out that maybe they don't need it
all the time, or maybe they could do both.
Maybe swarm is so simple that in somecases I just don't deploy Kubernetes.
Maybe I deploy some swarmand there's no shade here.
I'm not hating on anyproduct or any open source.
(21:16):
this is all best effort.
But Mirantis has given us thatlevel of certainty that we never
really had with Docker, and Ireally appreciate that of them.
So what do I know in addition to thosefacts, I now have multiple people inside
of Docker and Mirantis, the companiesthat work around swarm or related to
swarm, and they're all interested in it.
(21:36):
They're all curious aboutthe community feedback.
So if you have contracts with anyof these companies, let them know
that you're interested in Swarm.
Even if you're not running it,just tell 'em, Hey, we're always
curious whether Swarm has addedmore functionality to solve problems
so that we don't need Kubernetes.
Wouldn't it be wild if a decade afterSwarm was released and after Kubernetes
(22:00):
rose to prominence that we all kindof looked at Kubernetes and went,
yeah, that's really cool and it doesreally cool things, but, now that, you
know, maybe there's budget cuts and AIchanges, some things maybe I don't need,
All this complexity and maybesome of the things I do, I can get
away with simpler stuff then weend up having a swarm resurgence.
If you don't know the history ofSwarm with me and the relationship
(22:21):
I have with it, I have twocourses that Teach Swarm on Udemy.
So you can, in this video, youcan go down this description,
there's a link to my courses.
You can buy either my DockerMastery course, which also teaches
swarm or the swarm course, whichhas a full swarm, walkthrough.
it's many hours of swarm.
I've been a big fan of it forspecific simple use cases.
(22:43):
I've run it myself in productionon the internet for years.
I've helped many companiesdeploy it over the years.
Even the Old Swarm Classic, Ihelped a couple of companies
deploy that before the swarm, themodern swarm came out swarm mode.
So I've always been a fan of it forpeople that have simple uses I'm excited
to see that there's a team willing togo out there on the internet and say,
(23:05):
If you pay us, we will still support you.
And we are still investingin this open source project.
I'm so happy that we have some clarityon this and that there's a company
willing to step out there, especiallyconsidering all this AI shakeup,
So I think a lot of vendors are justscared to commit to anything because
who knows where they're gonna be in 12months, maybe all this stuff is irrelevant
(23:25):
and AI DevOps becomes a thing and the AIwill just run all the Kubernetes for us.
So we don't need other alternativesbecause the AI knows Kubernetes so well
that it makes all the hard things simpler.
I don't know that it's gonnasolve the resource problem,
but But you know, we can hope.
Thanks for listening.
And I'll see you in the next episode.
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