Is Docker Swarm Mode EOL?

TL;DR

No, its not. But there is no “Docker-Swarm-Mode-As-A-Service” provider anymore.

Mirantis has bought Docker-EE

Late in 2019 Mirantis has bought Docker Enterprise (docker-ee).

First at all, you need to know what docker-ee is.
Long story short telling: It’s docker-as-a-service.

Mean, you get a shiny web ui, where you can easily deploy docker swarm mode and/or k8s — on-premise, on your hybrid-cloud or on single/multi cloud (simply anywhere).
It also makes some magic translations, so that you can deploy your docker yaml stack file also as (it is) in k8s.

And that’s what Mirantis has bought.

Docker Swarm Mode itself is not a feature of docker-ee! Docker Swarm Mode is a general feature of the docker engine and also part of docker-ce — The community edition which most of you are using and what poweres the most k8s clusters out there.

Why docker swarm mode was announce to be dead?

In their announcement it says:

What About Docker Swarm?

The primary orchestrator going forward is Kubernetes. Mirantis is committed to providing an excellent experience to all Docker Enterprise platform customers and currently expects to support Swarm for at least two years, depending on customer input into the roadmap. Mirantis is also evaluating options for making the transition to Kubernetes easier for Swarm users.

TL;DR: Mirantis will drop docker-swarm-mode-as-a-server and move forward only with k8s.

This misleads many lead IT media sites to announce that docker swarm mode is dead, which is wrong.
Docker Swarm Mode is still alive and inluded in docker-ce.
But there is no as-a-service provider for docker swarm mode anymore.

Conclusion

As long as there are no deprecation warnings about docker swarm mode in the next docker-ce release (in case there will be new releases of docker-ce), feel free to move forward with it.
Because docker swarm mode is still the most simple and most lightweight method to drive a cluster for container orchestrations.