[BretFisher]

Swarm isn't going away, and in fact, Docker has stated it publicly multiple times on their blog since K8s announcement, and has continued to add new features and fix bugs. Their Kubernetes integrations in Docker EE takes advantage of Swarm's built-in security for node setup. Lots of improvement in the last 6-9 months on Overlay and zero-downtime updates, but true, compared to the first year of SwarmKit, this last 6 months has slowed down in terms of PR's for new features, likely due to focus on K8s integration. Your rolling update issues were likely related to bugs that are (hopefully) now fixed.

[jonballant]

"It does make me hesitate to recommend Swarm for a new service, with the risk that it will be end-of-lifed soon."

This was my exact concern. With the announcement at the end of 2017 that Docker EE would be integrating Kubernetes, it gave me pause as to whether to put Swarm into production now, when there is the possibility Docker could be moving away from Swarm entirely in the near future.

Do you have any sources that there will be continued investment in Swarm?

All recent blog posts I see are hyping of the features of the Kubernetes integration.

[BretFisher]

Nov 16h, 2017 Docker creates a blog post covering why Swarm is key to the future of Docker EE and K8s integration: https://blog.docker.com/2017/11/swarm-orchestration-in-docke...

March 9th, 2018 Docker creates a blog post highlighting a major new feature coming to Swarm in Docker EE 2.0 (alongside K8s integration). https://blog.docker.com/2018/03/enhanced-layer-7-routing-swa...

There's a lot more evidence that I hope to put into a blog post soon. No company will guarantee they will always make a product, but we've got years of enterprise support for Swarm as it is, and they keep adding functionality so I have no evidence of them stopping or even hinting at such a thing.

[BretFisher]

A full list of all the evidence that it's not dead: https://www.bretfisher.com/is-swarm-dead-answered-by-a-docke...

[BretFisher]

The TL;DR [direct quote from Docker blog](https://blog.docker.com/2017/11/swarm-orchestration-in-docke...) after the Kubernetes announcement:

> But it’s equally important for us to note that Swarm orchestration is not going away. Swarm forms an integral cluster management component of the Docker EE platform; in addition, Swarm will operate side-by-side with Kubernetes in a Docker EE cluster, allowing customers to select, based on their needs, the most suitable orchestration tool at application deployment time.

[marcc]

I agree that most of the issues we encountered were early bugs that have been resolved. While Docker 1.12 and 1.13 had some stability issues with services, it was early and they’ve been addressed. Swarm has been really stable for us since then.

I’ve written and shipped a container scheduler/orchestration runtime that’s being used today for some enterprise workloads. It’s a hard problem, and Swarm, Kubernetes and nomad are are solving it well.

Swarm is often overlooked as a production grade platform, but it’s absolutely production grade.