#Shaun #OMeara #Mirantis #Talks #Swarm #Kubernetes #Cloud #Native #Computing #VMblog
VMblog reached out to Shaun O’Meara, Field CTO, Mirantis to find out more about Swarm and its relationship with Kubernetes and cloud native computing.
VMblog: What
is Swarm?
Shaun O’Meara: Docker
Swarm provides a simple, straightforward way to combine a number of Docker
nodes into a cluster to enable the scheduling and orchestration of
containers. Swarm offers a simpler alternative to Kubernetes, and is
often used in application deployments that require less complex orchestration
and smaller infrastructure overhead.
VMblog: How
is Swarm used?
O’Meara: Developers
can define Swarm service stacks to deploy and manage a multi container
application across a multi-node swarm cluster. Applications deployed using
Swarm leverage the Swarm cluster to ensure that the application is running the
correct number of containers and supports ensuring increased application
resilience and load balancing. Swarm is often used in scenarios where low
infrastructure overhead is required and high deployment speed is required.
VMblog: Why
is it so important that Mirantis continues to support Swarm?
O’Meara: Swarm
was the original orchestrator provided by Docker for containers and remains a
popular choice for container orchestrations. Mirantis has a large number
of Enterprise customers who are reliant on Swarm for their container workload
management. The simplicity, ease of use and proven reliability provided
by Swarm ensures its continued use for many enterprise applications. The
effort required to migrate applications to Kubernetes is often not worth the
marginal gains for simpler applications.
Mirantis
feels that continuing to support Swarm and the community of global Swarm users
and customers is important to ensure the continued growth and reliability of
the container ecosystem and the journey towards modern
applications.
VMblog: What
steps is Mirantis taking to support Swarm?
O’Meara: Mirantis
is fully committed to the ongoing development and support of Swarm. Swarm
is an integral part of our Mirantis Kubernetes Engine product – delivering
customers with choice of both Kubernetes and Swarm orchestrators for their
container workload needs. Mirantis has development, testing & support
engineers staffed for the continued development and maintenance of Swarm, while
we also contribute these enhancements back to the open source community.
To
put this into perspective, we maintain the following and more for our Swarm
customers:
- FIPS Certification and Support
- Signed Image Support
- Regular Security validation and
updates (typically on a 6-week cadence) - Extended support providing a
24-month window - Extensive lifecycle management
tooling - Security integration to enable
RBAC and Enterprise Authentication - Image pruning -
Automating routine maintenance of nodes - Extensive Metrics
As
part of our ongoing roadmap to support Swarm, we are going to include support
for the following:
- Swarm CSI – Currently going
through upstream validation - MKE Mandatory Swarm resources
constraints – Enabling administrators to set constraints for CPU and
memory requests - MKE Swarm Chargebacks -
Enabling chargeback reporting for Swarm clusters
VMblog: What
is the relationship between Swarm and Kubernetes?
O’Meara: Fundamentally,
Swarm is an alternative container orchestrator to Kubernetes. Swarm
originated from Docker as a way to facilitate the management of Docker
containers, where Kubernetes originated from Google for similar goals.
Each has its advantages, of course; Swarm gained a lot of traction to start
because it is part of Docker itself, so developers don’t need to add anything
else. It’s also simpler to deploy and use than Kubernetes. Kubernetes, however,
has surpassed Swarm in usage, and has its own environments and adherents.
That
doesn’t, however, mean there’s a clear answer as to which is “better”. There
are many factors that determine which is better for a specific use, such as
existing environment, target environment, application complexity, and so on.
VMblog: What
is the relationship between Swarm and cloud native computing?
O’Meara: Swarm
provides developers embarking on the journey to building modern cloud native
applications with a significantly less complex container orchestration solution
that is easy to learn and adopt. The simplicity means developers can move
faster and achieve their business goals faster.
In
cloud native computing, we decompose our main application into a collection of
smaller, individual applications or workloads, and package these workloads into
individual containers allowing them to be run in various places in a cloud
environment. If we think of a cloud native deployment as an orchestra, in
which each workload is a performer in the orchestra, Swarm is the conductor
keeping everyone playing in harmony with one another.
Ultimately
a container orchestrator, or Swarm in this example, is not absolutely required
to deploy applications in a cloud native manner, but to do so at any scale, and
with acceptable up-time and resilience it is a de-facto required component of a
cloud native deployment.
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