from Hacker News

Docker

by hundt on 3/25/23, 9:33 PM with 138 comments

by soneil on 3/26/23, 1:12 AM
The narrative seems quite clear to me. They released the tooling and the services to become the defacto solution, and then Swarm was supposed to be the cashcow that turned that into cashflow. And then k8s happened.
They've raised a tonne of capital, and it probably looked sane at the time. And now they're grasping at straws trying to figure out how else they can turn this into revenue.
A lot of the recent narrative has been worded like pivoting into a glorified webhost was their evil plan all along. It's not, it's an act of desperation.
by Julesman on 3/26/23, 4:06 AM
I know I will get downvoted for this as off topic, but this is just the latest blog we've seen in this top 30 of many that show ZERO regard for legibility. Yes, I can zoom my browser, but c'mon.
A 13px font for paragraph text is nearly hostile. It's not that legible to people with perfect eyesight, but then it's not at all legible to anyone with imperfect eyesight. It's like saying you don't care if anyone who reads your blog would struggle doing that. And given how very simple it is to change, it's kind of insulting, specifically given how many years usability has been a thing.
10 years ago I wouldn't have written this comment. But now this isn't how you behave if you have an audience.
by sirius87 on 3/26/23, 5:58 AM
In its weird death spiral, if Docker Inc. were to be bought out by Microsoft, I shudder to think how much of the dev ecosystem would yet again depend on Microsoft's good graces to shoulder the burden of storage and data transfer costs for building products. They already do npm and Github (+ Github Container Registry) so they have some standing in being stewards in this space.
On the plus side, it would perhaps give enterprises more confidence about their build pipelines remaining dependent on Docker Hub, maybe even being more comfortable paying for it.
On the flip side, far too much of the dev ecosystem would depend on Microsoft, the famed supervillain of open communities. EDIT: With that sense in mind, I am indeed rooting for Docker Inc. to succeed.
by Waterluvian on 3/26/23, 3:00 AM
> How is it that Docker Inc., creator of one of the most important and ubiquitous tools in the modern software industry, has become such a backwater of rent-seeking and foot-shooting?
My guess: Because not all good ideas are profitable. Especially in software.
I read most but not all of the article, so if I missed this already being stated, that’s egg on my face.
by ghshephard on 3/26/23, 4:06 AM
As a newcomer to the devops world I was kind of surprised at the general thesis of this article, that companies use docker hub and using something different is awkward. Neither of the two companies I’ve worked for use it (artifacory in both cases) and there is a general taboo around having docker desktop binaries on any company systems (though docker engine seems to be prevalent). I guess I had just assumed that the golden / default path was to use one of the (non docker) commercial registries. So from that perspective, the suggestion that there are some patterns that still use dockerhub by default was actually enlightening.
by cortesoft on 3/26/23, 3:47 AM
> In particular, the union file system (UFS) image format is a choice that seems more academically aspirational than practical. Sure, it has tidy properties in theory, but my experience has been that developers spend a lot more time working around it than working with it.
What is the alternative that is better? The ability to have layers that build on top of each other and can be cached is a big feature... what alternatives provide that and are better?
by mitchellh on 3/26/23, 2:31 AM
I’m someone who had a front row seat to the emergence of Docker, and some might say competed with them (I’d disagree on that point). I don’t plan on commenting on their company, business model, or recent decisions. The only thing I want to comment on is the claim Docker was evolutionary, not revolutionary.
I disagree, I believe Docker /was/ revolutionary. And I feel like I see heavy technologists make this sort of dismissal based on technical points too soon. From a technical perspective, it was arguably evolutionary — a lot of people were poking at LXC and containerization a long time before Docker came around — but from a product perspective it was surely revolutionary.
I used to joke, in my own experience building a business in the DevOps space, that you’d spend 2 years building a globally distributed highly scalable complex piece of software, and no one would pay for it. Then you slap a GUI on it, and suddenly someone is willing to pay a million dollars for it. Now, that’s mostly tongue in cheek, but there is a kernel of truth to it.
The kernel of truth is that the technology itself isn’t valuable; it’s the /humanization/ of a technology, how it interfaces with the people who use it every day.
So what Docker did that was revolutionary was take a bunch of disparate pieces, glue them together, and put an incredible user experience on top of it so that that technology was now instantly available in minutes to just about anyone who cared.
At some point in the article, the author says it’s maybe something about a “workflow.” I’m… highly biased to say yes, absolutely. One of my core philosophies (that became the 1st point of the Tao of the company I helped start) is “workflows, not technologies.” When I talk about it, I mean it in a slightly different way, but it’s highly related: the workflow is super valuable for adoption, the technology is to a certain extent, but less so.
Technology enthusiasts (hey, I’m one of you!) usually hate to hear this. We all want to think you build the best thing or a revolutionary thing and then it just wins. That’s sometimes, but rarely, the case. You need that aspect, and you ALSO need timing to be right, the interface to be right, the explanation to be right, etc. Docker got this all right.
(Now, turning the above success into a business is a whole different can of worms, and like I said in the first paragraph, I don’t plan on commenting.)
For the author: I don’t mean any offense by this. I mostly agree with the other points of your post. The “FROM” being revolutionary I was nodding quite vigorously. Being able to “docker run ubuntu” was super magical, etc. I mostly wanted to point this because I see MANY technologists dismiss the excitement of technologies purely on the basis of technology over, and over, and over again, and the sad thing is its just one part of a much bigger package.
by schappim on 3/26/23, 4:09 AM
The Docker saga teaches us the significance of default settings, the relationship between free and paid software services, and the need to consider the economic implications of relying on free services provided by a company, as these can alter over time.
by quickthrower2 on 3/26/23, 6:16 AM
How does the Docker story compare to NPM who are also freely hosting a bunch if stuff, heavily downloaded and relying on some paid users but mostly free. And NPM has “competing” repositorys too. Could the same happen with NPM where they need to charge?
I get that NPM packages are smaller than docker images typically.
by ericb on 3/27/23, 12:42 AM
Docker is at 130 Million in annual revenue now!
At current average SaaS revenue multiples (6.7), Docker is on the cusp of Unicorn status.
It's weird to read comments about "poor, sad, dying Docker" given how ridiculously successful Docker's Desktop licensing scheme is.
https://devclass.com/2023/03/24/docker-subscription-revenue-...
by globalreset on 3/26/23, 5:20 AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Containers 2004 I will just leave it here.
by berkle4455 on 3/26/23, 2:47 AM
okay so swarm is dead, but is kubernetes actually that good or is it just ubiquitous and you’re forced to use it today? what about nomad? or mrsk?
by wg0 on 3/26/23, 9:41 AM
They have expertise and have visibility. If I were them, I would extend docker-compose with a cloud version that runs flawlessly including stateful workloads with backup and restors and charge for that. Heroku but even more simplified.
You change your docker-compose, push and we detect via webhook and deploy. Logs, metrices everything from command line with bubble tee or something.
Most companies have brilliant engineers and shortsighted, incompetent out of touch product teams.
by chrisbolt on 3/26/23, 12:12 AM
> There's been a lot of discussion lately about Docker, mostly about their boneheaded reversal following their boneheaded apology for their boneheaded decision to eliminate free teams.
So making a bad decision is bad, but admitting it was a bad decision and reversing it is also bad?
by justsomehnguy on 3/26/23, 7:47 AM
> Docker images are relatively large, and Docker Hub became so central to the use of Docker that it became common for DevOps toolchains to pull images to production nodes straight from Docker Hub
Not only that, but it was actively encouraged by all Docker fanbois to pull as soon as you can. When I saw Watchtower the first time I was just speechless.
Though IMO they had a chance at getting money long before that debacle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34377674
by jacooper on 3/26/23, 4:08 PM
> Docker Inc.'s goal was presumably that users would start using paid Docker plans to raise the quotas but, well, that's only attractive for users that either don't know about caching proxies or judge the overhead of using one to be more costly than Docker Hub... and I have a hard time picturing an organization where that would be true.
But that achieved their goal too? They wanted to reduce loses from bandwidth costs, that works by either making the users pay, or use less bandwidth.
by _boffin_ on 3/26/23, 4:54 AM
Question: Possible for Docker to die as a company; VC's lose their money; the technology survives and is still the mainstay? if the answer is no, what's the future and what do you expect the timeline will be? have a probability of that actually occurring?
by Havoc on 3/26/23, 6:48 AM
The issue here is mainly commercial.
They had guaranteed cost (hosting & serving a bunch of heavy data) and no obvious monetization play available.
by Kiro on 3/26/23, 7:20 AM
> their boneheaded reversal following their boneheaded apology for their boneheaded decision
How can the decision and reversal both be boneheaded?
by KronisLV on 3/26/23, 1:06 AM
> Still, the point of this tangent about Docker Desktop is that Docker's decision to monetize via Desktop---and in a pretty irritating way that caused a great deal of heartburn to many software companies---was probably the first tangible sign that Docker Inc. is not the benevolent force that it had long seemed to be. Suddenly Docker, the open-source tool that made our work so much easier, had an ugly clash with capitalism.
> Docker Hub, though, may yet be Docker's undoing. I can only assume that Docker did not realize the situation they were getting into. Docker images are relatively large, and Docker Hub became so central to the use of Docker that it became common for DevOps toolchains to pull images to production nodes straight from Docker Hub. Bandwidth is relatively expensive even before cloud provider margins; the cost of operating Docker Hub must have become huge. Docker Inc.'s scaffolding for the Docker community suddenly became core infrastructure for endless cloud environments, and effectively a subsidy to Docker's many users.
I'm not sure why they couldn't have been a bit more aggressive about monetization from the start?
DockerHub could have been free for an X amount of storage, with image retention of Y days by default, with Z amount of traffic allowed per month. The Internet Archive tells me that they got this half right, with "unlimited public repos" being where things went wrong: http://web.archive.org/web/20200413232159/https:/hub.docker....
> The basics of Docker for every developer, including unlimited public repos and one private repo.
For all I care, Docker Desktop might have just offered a CLI solution with the tech to run it (Hyper-V or WSL2 back ends) for free, but charge extra for the GUI and additional features, like running Kubernetes workloads. BuildKit could have been touted as an enterprise offering with immense power for improving build times, at a monetary cost.
Perhaps it all was in the name of increasing adoption initially? In a sense, I guess they succeeded, due to how common containers are. It is easy to wonder about these things after the fact, but generally people get rather upset when you give them things for free and later try to take them away, or introduce annoyances. Even if you cave to the feedback and roll back any such initiatives, the damage is already done, at least to some degree.
I still remember a piece of software called Lens one day starting to mandate that users sign in with accounts, which wasn't previously necessary. The community reacted predictably: https://github.com/lensapp/lens/issues/5444 (they also introduced a subscription plan later: https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/wakkaj/lens_6_i...)
That said, I self host my own images in a Nexus instance and will probably keep using Docker as the tooling/environment, because for my personal stuff I don't have a reason to actually switch to anything else at the moment and Docker itself is good enough. Podman Desktop and Rancher Desktop both seem viable alternatives for GUI software, whereas for the actual runtimes and cloud image registries, there are other options, though remember that you get what you pay for.
by bobleeswagger on 3/26/23, 3:08 AM
I think we're past the point where key players like AWS have _ran with_ the technology Docker provided and did not pay their fair share in the process.
Docker as a company may be a joke, but I don't think the software will be nearly as nice to use without them. I think it's ridiculous that so many asshats are jumping on the hate Docker (the company) bandwagon without understanding how much they have been taken advantage of by the big players who can absolutely support them, but choose not to.
Sometimes I am so disappointed at how much ego still exists in tech. We're supposed to be more educated than the folks who came before us, yet we're doing a worse job.
by krisknez on 3/26/23, 8:04 AM
WASM is the future
by jaequery on 3/26/23, 3:39 AM
The Docker management team needs visionaries. Someone who actually understands what Docker can truly be. Right now they are just trying to milk the cow before it can even produce milk.