Mirantis announced updates to
Swarm that optimize use of compute resources and enhance security, plus
plans to deliver additional features focused on enterprise security
requirements. Mirantis delivers enterprise-grade Swarm through
Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (MKE).
"While Kubernetes has taken over as the world's leading container
orchestrator, Swarm continues to be a popular option with more than 100
of our customers utilizing Swarm for production workloads, and continual
sales inquiries from enterprises interested in Swarm," said Shaun
O'Meara, chief technology officer, Mirantis. "We'll continue to support
and enhance Swarm with plans for additional features coming from our
engineering staff dedicated to Swarm."
Originally developed by Docker, Swarm is an integral part of MKE, which
provides customers with choice of both Kubernetes and Swarm
orchestrators for their container workloads. The most recent Swarm
updates include:
- Scheduled image pruning for administrators to clean up unused container images, to optimize use of compute resources.
- Setting Swarm resource limits, enabling administrators to set constraints for process (CPU) and memory usage.
Planned next features for Swarm include IPv6 support, as well as support for ARM processors.
Mirantis customers using Swarm include MetLife, Royal Bank of Canada,
and S&P Global, a top five global telecom operator, large federal
agency, other financial services companies, and global pharmaceutical
manufacturers. That amounts to more than 10,000 nodes spread across
approximately 1,000 clusters, supporting over 100,000 containers
orchestrated by Swarm.
The vast majority of enterprise Swarm customers also deploy Kubernetes
clusters using MKE, and a significant number of them deploy mixed
clusters with both Swarm and Kubernetes nodes. MKE provides users with a
convenient on-ramp for future Kubernetes adoption.
Swarm is an easy-to-use lightweight container orchestrator that offers a
simpler alternative to Kubernetes, and is often used in application
deployments that require less complex orchestration and smaller
infrastructure overhead.
Mirantis conducts regular security validation and updates to address
security vulnerabilities. MKE uses encryption modules that are validated
for Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 security
requirements.