Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (formerly Docker Enterprise)

What do you like best?

The good parts of Docker Engerprise are: Theability to run both Docker Swarm and Kubernetes workloads which makes it flexible, Solid RBAC system that allows for powerful multi tenancy with groups, permissions and users. Regular and relatively painless updates and lastly, effective and quick support from Mirantis. It's useful to be able to use both the CLI as well as the web UI. Docker UCP and DTR work together very well. API access lets you to effectively monitor and automate your deployments and container image builds.

What do you dislike?

Some of the things that need improving are: The confusing licensing model, which is a mix of node and CPU licenses. Moreover Mirantis has sent us two license files as we upgraded the number of nodes, however only one license file can be uploaded into UCP. Support for Windows Server 2016 is being phased out which is understandable, but would be a welcome feature to keep for customers who still run some legacy containers. Slight UI glitches in UCP/DTR, for example some strange search/filter behaviour and inability to stack tables by some columns. This could be specific to our setup, but we have experienced occasional Calico errors, even without running any kubernes workloads.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Give it a try, There is an option to try before you buy with a trial.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

It's an effective solution at tacklling challenges that come with creating a decentralised, highly available platform for containerised applications. If I had to highlight a single quality that helps us solve problems, it would be flexibility. We were able to accomplish everything we aimed to accomplish on Docker Enterprise.