MetalBear Named Cool Vendor™ by Gartner®

As cloud architectures become more complex, it becomes imperative to solve the slow process of building software for the cloud. This is not a new problem, and many companies tried to solve it before, but at MetalBear we found the way to do it in building mirrord, and our community and customers agree. Today we’re very happy to share that we’ve been recognized as a Cool Vendor in the 2025 Gartner Cool Vendors in Container Management report¹.

What makes mirrord cool? #

No engineer writing software for the cloud is happy with their development process. Because production environments have grown so complex, we have lost the ability to run copies of them locally, and getting new code to production has become a stop-start marathon of builds, CI and deployments to various testing environments. Older developers yearn for the days when you could just hit F5 and debug your code in your IDE.

Which is exactly what mirrord lets you do. It allows developers to run their code locally while seamlessly mirroring traffic, environment variables, and services from a remote Kubernetes cluster. This gives developers the realism of testing inside a production-like environment without the overhead of actually deploying code. It also allows multiple developers to safely share a cluster for development, eliminating the bottleneck on shared staging environments, and allowing organizations to save cloud costs by consolidating multiple testing clusters.

We believe this recognition by Gartner validates the direction we’ve been pursuing since day one: helping organizations remove bottlenecks in cloud development so their teams can ship features faster, stay ahead of competitors, and do so with lower cloud costs.

The road ahead #

As Kubernetes adoption continues to accelerate, the demand for efficient, production-like development workflows will only grow. We are committed to meeting that demand by expanding mirrord’s capabilities, from database branching to mirrord for CI and AI-driven testing. By giving teams a way to move faster without ballooning costs or unnecessary complexity, this recognition reinforces our belief that mirrord is helping shape the future of cloud development.

We also want to take a moment to thank the mirrord community. mirrord wouldn’t be where it is today without the engineers who adopted it early, shared feedback, and helped us refine the product. Thank you for your trust and support!

Developers can get started with mirrord today by visiting metalbear.com/mirrord or exploring the open-source project on GitHub.

Disclaimer

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Cool Vendors is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.