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It was announced a ~month ago that Mirantis (Aquirer of Swam and Docker Enterprise) will continue to develop Swarm with no implied death date. https://www.mira

It was announced a ~month ago that Mirantis (Aquirer of Swam and Docker Enterprise) will continue to develop Swarm with no implied death date. https://www.mirantis.com/blog/mirantis-will-continue-to-support-and-develop-docker-swarm/ https://www.mirantis.com/blog/mirantis-will-continue-to-supp... It is also an open source project, so even if the corporate overlords abandon it, the code could live on!

GordonS 7y ago
I certainly hope so - Swarm is a wonderful orchestration system for small deployments (at least, I haven't tried to use it for large ones), and is really easy to use. It's also vastly simpler to comprehend and operate that Kubernetes, and doesn't eat CPU & memory for breakfast. I'd wager that Swarm would be a better fit than Kubernetes for most systems.
- jswny 7y ago
  Totally agree. I tested out both Kubernetes and Swarm for a recent project. Swarm was so vastly easier to not only understand at an architectural level, but to actually use, that I was delighted by using it. Kubernetes, on the other hand, was a real pain, and overly-complicated for 90% of projects I would say. It was even very difficult to setup a test cluster on my MacBook Pro to try out multi-node support (you have to find a good distribution, something that supports Mac for multi-node, etc.). Whereas for Swarm, it was super easy.
- rumanator 7y ago
  > I certainly hope so - Swarm is a wonderful orchestration system for small deployments (at least, I haven't tried to use it for large ones), and is really easy to use. I would argue that Docker Swarm is a wonderful orchestration system for all practical real-world applications, with the notable exception of really global and gigantic multi-region deployments. Docker Swarm works superbly out of the box and it's trivial to setup a multi-node heterogeneous cluster of COTS hardware and/or VM instances.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    I think there's a more specific statement about k8s vs swam. Swam is much better at running other people's applications that you're treating largely as a black box -- k8s excels at running your in-house app. The simpler deployment model means there's far less environment specific weirdness you need to contend to to make an arbitrary app run.
    - GordonS 7y ago
      The systems I've deployed with Swarm have generally been a mix of both - not sure why it would make a difference if you were running in-house or off-the-shelf images?
e12e 7y ago
That sounds promising. With the only choice for a while seemingly being "single container" or "k8s" for deployment - docker-compose for development seemed a bit of a dead end (ie - might as well go back to vagrant, and at least get proper heterogeneous host support as everyone would be running VMS, with no need for a Linux kernel on host). With an option like swarm, that fits a certain on-prem type scenario (eg: what gitlab now does with its horrible (working, but still horrible) omnibus installer would be a good fit for swarm). I never did understand why docker-compose wasn't treated "better" by docker - I guess they focus on non-linux devs? Docker without an orchestrator is a bit like a daemon without a supervisor - if everything fits in a single container - why not just run it as a Linux process? And compose was a perfectly OK orchestrator - it did some minimal, sensible things that you need, to compose a couple of containers. But it felt scary that you never knew what upstream intentions were.
- mixedCase 7y ago
  > docker-compose for development seemed a bit of a dead end (ie - might as well go back to vagrant It might be a VM either way for Mac and Windows, but Windows developers are likely to always be running a VM with Docker integration soon due to WSL 2, and on Linux it's still an incredible productivity multiplier that beats the pants off everything else when you have dependency issues. Only MacOS is left behind with the worst developer experience out of the three.
  - e12e 7y ago
    I actually meant that with vagrant, even us on Linux would run VMs, so if I set up a dev env, I can be pretty confident a colleague will run the same thing, with similar characteristics, on windows or Mac. With Docker, I feel it's still a bit kinda-sorta. Especially if you need to run multiple stacks for switching between projects.
    - mixedCase 7y ago
      > With Docker, I feel it's still a bit kinda-sorta. What makes you think that? Only difference I can think of is use of hemorrhaging edge kernel primitives in your application. Even networking is handled by docker-compose and you don't have to worry about port collision.

GordonS 7y ago

I certainly hope so - Swarm is a wonderful orchestration system for small deployments (at least, I haven't tried to use it for large ones), and is really easy to use. It's also vastly simpler to comprehend and operate that Kubernetes, and doesn't eat CPU & memory for breakfast. I'd wager that Swarm would be a better fit than Kubernetes for most systems.

jswny 7y ago
Totally agree. I tested out both Kubernetes and Swarm for a recent project. Swarm was so vastly easier to not only understand at an architectural level, but to actually use, that I was delighted by using it. Kubernetes, on the other hand, was a real pain, and overly-complicated for 90% of projects I would say. It was even very difficult to setup a test cluster on my MacBook Pro to try out multi-node support (you have to find a good distribution, something that supports Mac for multi-node, etc.). Whereas for Swarm, it was super easy.
rumanator 7y ago
> I certainly hope so - Swarm is a wonderful orchestration system for small deployments (at least, I haven't tried to use it for large ones), and is really easy to use. I would argue that Docker Swarm is a wonderful orchestration system for all practical real-world applications, with the notable exception of really global and gigantic multi-region deployments. Docker Swarm works superbly out of the box and it's trivial to setup a multi-node heterogeneous cluster of COTS hardware and/or VM instances.
- Spivak 7y ago
  I think there's a more specific statement about k8s vs swam. Swam is much better at running other people's applications that you're treating largely as a black box -- k8s excels at running your in-house app. The simpler deployment model means there's far less environment specific weirdness you need to contend to to make an arbitrary app run.
  - GordonS 7y ago
    The systems I've deployed with Swarm have generally been a mix of both - not sure why it would make a difference if you were running in-house or off-the-shelf images?

e12e 7y ago

That sounds promising. With the only choice for a while seemingly being "single container" or "k8s" for deployment - docker-compose for development seemed a bit of a dead end (ie - might as well go back to vagrant, and at least get proper heterogeneous host support as everyone would be running VMS, with no need for a Linux kernel on host). With an option like swarm, that fits a certain on-prem type scenario (eg: what gitlab now does with its horrible (working, but still horrible) omnibus installer would be a good fit for swarm). I never did understand why docker-compose wasn't treated "better" by docker - I guess they focus on non-linux devs? Docker without an orchestrator is a bit like a daemon without a supervisor - if everything fits in a single container - why not just run it as a Linux process? And compose was a perfectly OK orchestrator - it did some minimal, sensible things that you need, to compose a couple of containers. But it felt scary that you never knew what upstream intentions were.

mixedCase 7y ago
> docker-compose for development seemed a bit of a dead end (ie - might as well go back to vagrant It might be a VM either way for Mac and Windows, but Windows developers are likely to always be running a VM with Docker integration soon due to WSL 2, and on Linux it's still an incredible productivity multiplier that beats the pants off everything else when you have dependency issues. Only MacOS is left behind with the worst developer experience out of the three.
- e12e 7y ago
  I actually meant that with vagrant, even us on Linux would run VMs, so if I set up a dev env, I can be pretty confident a colleague will run the same thing, with similar characteristics, on windows or Mac. With Docker, I feel it's still a bit kinda-sorta. Especially if you need to run multiple stacks for switching between projects.
  - mixedCase 7y ago
    > With Docker, I feel it's still a bit kinda-sorta. What makes you think that? Only difference I can think of is use of hemorrhaging edge kernel primitives in your application. Even networking is handled by docker-compose and you don't have to worry about port collision.