[HN Gopher] Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years
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Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years
Author : smalter
Score : 198 points
Date : 2023-01-13 18:49 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sacra.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sacra.com)
| timost wrote:
| On debian and Ubuntu there is the podman-docker [1] package which
| is really convenient. It allows you to use docker commands with
| podman as the underlying engine.
|
| [1] https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/podman-docker
| drewda wrote:
| For what it's worth, I'd call this "Docker 3.0" given that the
| first iteration was dotCloud, their Heroku competitor -- I liked
| using that!
| pharmakom wrote:
| I use Docker all over the place but I don't pay Docker inc one
| cent.
| benatkin wrote:
| git mv Dockerfile Containerfile git mv .dockerignore
| .containerignore brew install podman
| kdrag0n wrote:
| Looks like there's a lot of discussion about Docker Desktop
| alternatives here, so shameless plug: I've been working on a new
| Linux+Docker+Kubernetes solution for macOS recently! Already has
| quite a few improvements over existing apps including Docker
| Desktop, Rancher, Colima, etc:
|
| - Fast networking: 30 Gbps! vs. 150 Mbps with Docker VPNKit. Full
| VPN compatibility, IPv6, ping, ICMP and UDP traceroute, and half-
| open TCP connections. (Future work: transparent proxies)
|
| - Bidirectional filesystem sharing: fast VirtioFS to access macOS
| from Linux, but there's also access to the Linux filesystem from
| macOS. This can help with performance: for example, you could
| store code in Linux and edit it from macOS with VS Code (which
| can take the performance hit of sharing), so the container runs
| with native FS speed.
|
| - Not limited to Docker or Kubernetes. You can run multiple full
| Linux distros as system containers (like WSL) so they share
| resources.
|
| - Fast x86 emulation with Rosetta
|
| - Bidirectional CLI integration like WSL
|
| - Much lower background CPU usage. Only ~0.05% CPU usage and 2-5
| idle wakeups per second -- less than most apps, while Docker
| wakes up ~120 times per second. Made possible with low-level
| kernel optimizations. Also, no Electron!
|
| - Better solutions to other problems that can occur on macOS:
| clock drift is corrected monotonically, dynamic disk size, and
| more I'm working on now. Will look into memory usage too,
| although I can't guarantee a good fix for that.
|
| - No root needed
|
| Planning to release it as a paid app later this month. Not OSS,
| but I think the value proposition is pretty good and there will
| be a free trial. Not sure about pricing yet. (Let me know if you
| have any thoughts on this!)
|
| If anyone is interested, drop me an email (see bio) and I'll let
| you know when this is ready for testing, likely within a week or
| two at most :)
|
| Also, feel free to ask questions here or let me know if there are
| other warts you'd like to see fixed.
| uberduper wrote:
| I haven't used a mac for quite some time and when I did, I used
| docker-machine. I recall from my use and from trying to help
| others that were using docker desktop, it was unusually
| difficult to make your ssh-agent available in a container.
|
| If that's still an issue, then please figure out a way to make
| that seamless.
| babelfish wrote:
| How do you achieve 30Gbps?
| kdrag0n wrote:
| Great question! I wrote a new userspace network proxy/stack
| in Go, similar to Docker's VPNKit and built it with
| performance in mind at all levels.
|
| What makes it fast is support for modern NIC features that
| improve performance significantly, similar to those supported
| by Apple's in-kernel NAT (vmnet) but implemented in
| userspace. I've made changes to the guest kernel to implement
| these while working around limitations in Apple's
| Virtualization.framework. I'm not actually sure why it's
| slightly faster than vmnet in the host-to-guest direction (30
| vs. 25 Gbps), but I'll take it.
|
| Some snapshots of my journey working on the network stack:
|
| https://twitter.com/kdrag0n/status/1606461436863352832
|
| https://twitter.com/kdrag0n/status/1604288427306160128
|
| https://twitter.com/kdrag0n/status/1607236475715989506
|
| https://twitter.com/kdrag0n/status/1609013653214474240
| ilyt wrote:
| I'm more interested how docker achieves 150Mbit, that's dog
| slow
| user3939382 wrote:
| The second there's a CLI-only 100% compatible Docker Desktop
| replacement for macOS I'll use it. Docker Desktop on macOS is
| insanely slow and there's 0 reason it should be a GUI app that
| lives in my menubar, it's just ridiculous.
|
| So far all the alternatives are "mostly" compatible with caveats
| here and there.
| tpmx wrote:
| Yeah. It also relatively often breaks and requires a purge. I
| need to do it approximately once per month.
| vcryan wrote:
| Enjoy while it lasts. People are pissed about the approach they
| took to gain marketshare before changing the terms. Soon enough
| there will be a viable free alternative.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| I'm surprised Docker Desktop drives so much revenue. As far as I
| know, it is a Mac and Windows-specific tool.
|
| Are FAANG and FAANG-like developers not using Linux machines
| locally despite deploying production software on Linux servers?
| Even for enterprise developers who use Mac and Windows, isn't 99%
| of day-to-day development on a Linux box you SSH into anyways?
|
| I've never really quite grasped the need for Docker Desktop.
| drstewart wrote:
| >not using Linux machines locally despite deploying production
| software on Linux servers?
|
| no
|
| >isn't 99% of day-to-day development on a Linux box you SSH
| into anyways?
|
| no
| roland35 wrote:
| Nope, at least here there is our own homemade version of
| containers. And the idea of running anything local is not
| really realistic anyways!
| ilyt wrote:
| There is a myth that software developers are good with
| computers but that's mostly not the case, hence heavy
| mac/windows usage, harder to break than someone with linux
| machine and root.
|
| Also Ubuntu kinda breaks more for normal users.
| bobnamob wrote:
| Some acquisitions at FAANG I'm at have carve outs with legal
| and finance for docker desktop. Originally internal projects
| are all on internal tooling for compliance reasons
| makestuff wrote:
| So they waited until it was ingrained in most companies and then
| started charging for it?
|
| This seems like twist on the common play of subsidize with VC
| dollars until you have a large market share then increase the
| price to profitability.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| No, it was a change in strategy.
|
| The first attempt was to sell a crappy PaaS and container
| registry.
|
| The second attempt was about monetising the desktop tools, more
| of a Dev tools play.
|
| They have never really tried to bait and switch and monetise
| the Docker engine which always seemed like an open goal to me.
| $XX/year per engine and they would have been the next VMWare.
| Alas, seems like the current strategy is working well.
|
| Alongside the change in strategy, I think there has also been a
| change in culture. Docker 1.0 was absolutely dripping in
| arrogance and weren't set up for an enterprise sale. Developer
| tools seems like a much more natural fit.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Who knew charging for your products and services instead of
| giving them away for free yields more money?
| adriancr wrote:
| I am pretty happy they've managed to grow.
|
| I'm also pretty happy with the pro plan, it's pretty convenient
| to use as its default most places, free storage and transfers for
| images, no surprise costs.
|
| Haven't seen the appeal of docker desktop though as linux user...
| cmer wrote:
| The problem I see with their business model is that the
| technology has long been commoditized, and alternatives are often
| better. It's a pretty tough spot to be in.
|
| Anecdotally, I use Colima on my Mac, and it is better than Docker
| Desktop in pretty much every way I can think of. I'm sure I'm not
| alone.
|
| Generally, a company like Docker would sell support agreements
| (ie: how Red Hat does it), but selling support to developers
| rather than to support core infrastructure/production deployments
| probably wouldn't work. I hope they can figure it out and
| succeed.
| tootie wrote:
| It makes me wonder if Oracle is making any money off of Java at
| this point. Aside from losing court cases over IP, they have
| seriously soured the brand.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| This issue was brought up in the initial hacker news thread,
| when Docker was moving towards this pricing model. Here we are,
| $120M ARR later.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28369570
| wstuartcl wrote:
| I think it will be interesting to see the next few years.
| There were quite a few orgs that jumped as the pricing was
| introduced, detachment from k8s etc that was a side effect, a
| bunch of new options in (free) market. Just from my
| perspective out of the orgs I know of that bought into the
| pricing, every one of them has active projects to get off in
| the next year.
| cmer wrote:
| They have LONG way to go before they can prove sustainable in
| the long run and justify their valuation.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Competitive Docker Desktop replacements (podman) are just
| starting to see adoption IMO. Let's see the number next year.
| Lots of companies had no other choice but to pay.
| cabraca wrote:
| Maybe i'm just in a bubble but none of those Docker Desktop
| replacements work well on a locked down corporate laptop.
| Sure you can get it to work somehow, manually configuring
| proxies, dns and stuff. Docker Desktop somehow just works.
| Thats why we pay for it.
| twblalock wrote:
| That is changing fast and in a year or two Podman and
| Rancher (and a few others) will be just as good. A number
| of large companies are also building their own in-house
| replacements.
|
| I was personally looking for an alternative even before
| the license change, because the performance of Docker
| Desktop on my Macbook Pro is terrible in a number of
| different ways.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Really? I can run containers without root on Podman,
| which I could _never_ do with Docker.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Life is too short to spend a third of your active life
| left on a locked down corporate laptop. You should be
| admin.
| ilyt wrote:
| I mean, the corporate is paying you for that time either
| way so that's their loss really
| hhh wrote:
| Rancher Desktop works on my Macbook w/ Crowdstrike,
| Zscaler, Globalprotect, and I'm sure a few other things.
| Multipass doesn't.
| hnarn wrote:
| > Here we are, $120M ARR later.
|
| Juicing ARR in a dying company is not rocket science, keep an
| eye on that number and compare it in 2025 or so to Apple or
| Microsoft.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Such a strange way to say, "Charging enterprises for value
| provided." They're clearly providing value if customers are
| paying for it. If you would prefer to spend engineering
| time rolling your own, that is an option. Paying someone
| else to make that pain point go away is, clearly, also an
| option. Tangentially, sell to businesses, not individual
| devs.
|
| Isn't this forum supported financially by startups
| generating value from solving someone else's problem...for
| money?
| alooPotato wrote:
| The success bar you're defining is that Docker has to be as
| successful as two generational companies?!?!?!
|
| Also, please explain how one would "juice" ARR to $120M.
| hnarn wrote:
| Assuming I meant absolute dollars is absurd, I was
| talking about sustaining or increasing revenue. That
| should, if anything, be easier for a small company.
|
| In theory it's simple and it's happened many times: If
| you have a company with a lot of users but no income
| stream, you can hold those users hostage without adding
| much value, just find something that causes immense
| discomfort if it disappears and charge for it. Profit
| skyrockets, customers leave over time, the company dies.
| alooPotato wrote:
| I've never seen that get you to $120M ARR. Have any
| examples?
| hnarn wrote:
| What a strange argument. So if it hasn't happened before
| it's impossible?
| [deleted]
| alooPotato wrote:
| You said "Juicing ARR in a dying company is not rocket
| science" - I'm saying it is rocket science and that it's
| way hard. The fact there aren't any examples makes me
| feel like I'm correct in saying it's not easy.
| FunnyLookinHat wrote:
| Our company pays for Docker Desktop licenses, but we've made
| every other effort to not rely on Docker directly (e.g.
| DockerHub) to avoid the SPF. Pull-through caches with ECR were a
| quick way to drastically reduce reliance further.
|
| Given the state of our internal tooling, we can conceivably move
| to podman or similar within the next year if the license fees
| become onerous, but, given the size of our org, we likely will
| just keep forking over license fees as it's cheaper than the
| salary to remove the dependency.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I feel like it's also good to pay in order to support the
| company, so long as they continue to provide something of
| value.
| AeroNotix wrote:
| This is terrible financial advice.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| If paying for docker affects your bottom line, you have
| bigger problems. In the meantime, _not_ paying things
| creates a tragedy of the commons and distorts the market
| (by giving an advantage to incumbents who earn money on
| other things).
| pwinnski wrote:
| It doesn't seem like financial advice, but life advice.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Some companies are probably not far away from technical
| collapse if a few of their critical open source libraries
| and tooling go to shit. Better cough up a little bit now
| than have to fork in the future and set up a whole new team
| to maintain that dependency - likely with much worse
| results than before.
| caleblloyd wrote:
| The buildkit tooling such as `docker buildx bake` is great. I
| haven't seen this level of innovation from the other OCI builders
| that are aiming to replace Docker.
|
| I found the first scenario that I actually wanted to pay Docker
| for- a dedicated, hosted Buildx runner. Not some multi-tenant
| thing that reads and writes a slow cache to S3 before and after
| every build. A fast one, that keeps the cache hot.
|
| I'd pay 2x whatever the EC2 instance cost would be to have this
| managed and updated automatically.
| maxproske wrote:
| SJ rulz!
| karaterobot wrote:
| > ... capturing the credit card of the end-user developer for
| low-priced seats as a wedge into seat expansion in the org.
|
| What a weird and gross series of words and concepts, all strung
| together like that.
| paxys wrote:
| I remember everyone had written Docker off for dead when they
| announced their updated pricing plans, but they really made
| perfect sense, and I am happy to see the company recover. A large
| chunk of the tech world today relies on their products, but they
| were making next to nothing for it. It is definitely worth it for
| large companies to throw a few dollars their way considering the
| massive amount of value they are getting out of it. Whereas my
| company had no use for their earlier product offerings (private
| Docker Hub repos, Docker Swarm) we gladly paid money for Docker
| Desktop without even thinking about it.
| fullsend wrote:
| Great move by them to introduce a license requirement for 250+
| seats but not waste resources enforcing it (as far as I can
| tell). Those who will pay, will pay. Those who won't, will
| switch tools no matter how painful. They stayed relevant by
| keeping all their users, even those technically breaking the
| license, but also collected some cash.
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| I have a product that has zero reduction in functionality if
| your license or trial runs out, just constantly nags you when
| you do useful things with it. Eventually, the workers at the
| company insist on the company buying it. Sometimes takes 6
| months hah.
| blowski wrote:
| "Nagware"
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| Accurate.
| M3L0NM4N wrote:
| Companies can also get in trouble for not buying it, you
| could have an employee turn into a whistleblower for a
| lawsuit, to which they would get a % of.
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| New revenue stream!
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| This is how Oracle was born
| Alir3z4 wrote:
| WinRAR?
| icelancer wrote:
| And mIRC.
| smcl wrote:
| Sublime Text too
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| For a while, I got around the nag by just never closing
| mIRC. :-D
|
| After almost 20 years of using it, though, I thought "You
| know...this guy deserves his $20" and paid for it.
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| I still don't know how that dude makes money. People use
| my software multiple times a day, so the nag is quite
| annoying. I need WinRar once in a few months, maybe.
| ilyt wrote:
| I stopped pretty much since 7zip been a thing
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Corporate.
|
| Though if my memory servers me right one time I bought it
| for a staff of the site which has.. quite dubious legal
| position by hosting the abandonware. Of course it was
| technically a breach of contract because there were
| multiple people who could use it, it was still one legal
| license more.
| flandish wrote:
| Reminds me of old shareware games too. A good practice.
| Glad the model works for you!
| jacooper wrote:
| Winrar
| hangonhn wrote:
| This works incredibly well on me. I often use free or open
| source versions of tools and just ignore the nagging
| prompts about licenses. Then over time, if I like it enough
| that I eventually end up getting a license for it. I think
| the ability for me to see the value in something first
| before committing helps a lot. The free version sort of
| builds a reservoir of good will that eventually pushes me
| over to just paying for a license.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Agreed. The friction i have towards buying things i like
| is very low. As an Apple user i mistakenly convince
| myself that paying helps get better products[1], and so i
| don't mind buying products i like. However i have a ton
| of friction buying products when i don't know that
| they'll solve my problem. I judge them harshly on that
| first-buy.
|
| [1]: A semi humorous jab at Apple.
| ghaff wrote:
| And while easy to cancel subscriptions theoretically let
| you try and get out, the reality is often that something
| else comes up, maybe you'll try it next month, you're
| still not sure, you forget about it, and before you know
| it you've paid quite a bit.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Yea i don't like subscriptions either. For me though i
| look at it as a long term purchase and i don't like that.
|
| I don't mind licenses like JetBrains though. Ie purchase
| a year of updates, but it'll keep working regardless.
| Subscribe to Own also seems decent.. not sure i've used
| one though.
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| Exactly the idea.
| tomhallett wrote:
| I'm curious if there are any podcasts/blogs/books which
| give "pricing ideas/strategies" based on a "risky"
| premise like this: keep it very simple and don't worry
| about theft, because enterprise customers won't steal,
| and the math works out.
|
| Here's an excerpt of their pricing terms:
|
| Do I need a paid subscription to use the images on Docker
| Hub for commercial use? Images on Docker Hub can be used
| for commercial use, as long as Docker Desktop is properly
| licensed. Paid subscriptions are needed for commercial
| use of Docker Desktop at organizations with more than $10
| million annual revenue OR more than 250 employees.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| many indies went broke with market changes, using this
| logic..
|
| ps- I like this! I want the world to be like that.. but,
| reality check.. don't let suits find out
| spondyl wrote:
| > as far as I can tell
|
| I assumed we were non-compliant as nothing had changed like
| no accounts or license keys.
|
| It turns out it's more of a cover license where you purchase
| seats but from a developer PoV, nothing visibly changes.
|
| Procurement and Legal are the ones you'd want to ask about it
| since that's their contact point
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I'm still wondering if this will be enough to pay back the 10x
| on $430 mio in funding that their investors expect...
|
| $135 mio in revenue is great, but they need 4.3 billion in
| profits.
| thih9 wrote:
| > A large chunk of the tech world today relies on their
| products, but they were making next to nothing for it.
|
| Isn't this kind of monetization problem quite common for tech
| companies in general?
| runlevel1 wrote:
| The reasonable price helps. We could have switched back to
| docker-machine. We even had a PR ready to do it on our
| workstation setup scripts. But given what they were asking for
| the value given, it didn't make sense to cheap out.
| warinukraine wrote:
| What's Docker Desktop exactly?
| thefounder wrote:
| The thing that I have to install on MacOS so that I can run
| docker. Is there any other way(i.e no gui utility) ?
| paulmd wrote:
| your question is confusing, docker-desktop is a gui
| utility. rancher-desktop is the equivalent to that.
|
| if you _don 't_ want a command line, docker itself (the
| underlying utility that the docker-desktop GUI drives) is
| free, in contrast to the GUI portion. Or kubernetes.
|
| so the direct answer is "brew install docker".
| paxys wrote:
| Nope, none of this is correct. Docker only runs on Linux.
| The core purpose of Docker Desktop (and similar tools) is
| to spin up a Linux VM under the hood and manage its
| lifecycle, route network calls, share volumes etc. You
| can do all of this yourself of course, but it will be a
| non-trivial amount of effort to set it up.
|
| "brew install docker" is just another way to install
| Docker Desktop. It does not run Docker natively on MacOS,
| because that is impossible.
| ahepp wrote:
| similarly, `brew install podman` will install something a
| lot like Docker Desktop
| paxys wrote:
| The only way to get Docker to work on MacOS and Windows is
| to spin up a linux VM, install Docker in that VM, and pipe
| through all the calls to it. You can always do this
| manually using your VM of choice. There are a bunch of
| tools which make this more seamless, Docker Desktop being
| one of them. Alternatives are Podman, Colima, Rancher
| Desktop, all of them with their own pros and cons.
| uberduper wrote:
| You've been able to `brew install docker-machine` for like
| 10 years. Docker Desktop just gave you a UI for stopping
| and starting things. Eventually they added some kubernetes
| stuff and a kubernetes context switcher. Dunno what else it
| did since I always installed via brew.
|
| I would have been a docker desktop user for years but the
| one time I went to install it they required me to create an
| account to get to the download.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Linux I just install some stuff from apt, so I assume you
| can brew install something to run it command line (no GUI)
| ahepp wrote:
| Docker uses container functionality specific to the Linux
| kernel. So on Linux, you can install a relatively
| lightweight engine. But on MacOS or Windows, you need to
| install the entire "Docker Desktop" app, which secretly
| spins up a Linux VM in the background, and presents a
| (pretty poor) abstraction as if this is all running on
| the host machine.
| uberduper wrote:
| docker-machine from brew sets up the linux vm using one
| of a few virtualization options. iirc I always used bhyve
| and never had to give it a second thought.
| justahuman74 wrote:
| I use podman: https://podman.io/getting-
| started/installation#macos
|
| Its CLI is similar/same as docker
| avel wrote:
| Rancher desktop, or (my preferred) colima + docker cli.
| warinukraine wrote:
| What do you mean? I just do `apt install docker`.
| paxys wrote:
| > on MacOS
| paulmd wrote:
| brew install docker
| paxys wrote:
| That installs Docker Desktop, which is exactly what we
| are talking about
| pledg wrote:
| That installs the Docker CLI which is not Docker Desktop.
| brew install homebrew/cask/docker is Docker Desktop.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| > The thing that I have to install _on MacOS_ so that I
| can run docker.
|
| There is no apt on macOS.
| warinukraine wrote:
| Oh macOS doesn't have a package manager? Damn that sucks
| /s
|
| Don't play dumb, you're wasting everyone's time.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| The parent comment was talking about Docker desktop,
| which is clearly targeted at macos and windows. Saying
| that you can just download it with an apt command is
| irrelevant to the discussion, because we can't use that
| outside of linux.
| warinukraine wrote:
| > which is clearly targeted at macos and windows
|
| I didn't know what it was, so I didn't know it was only
| for macos and windows. If instead of being sarcastic he
| had just answered my question, I wouldn't have said
| something irrelevant.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| You asked a question which literally has no relevancy to
| or answer in macOS. There is no apt. There is no default
| package manager. There is no equivalent command to run on
| a new system.
|
| If you wanted a real answer, you should have asked a real
| question. Something like, are there any options other
| than docker desktop for macOS?
| warinukraine wrote:
| > What's Docker Desktop exactly?
|
| > If you wanted a real answer, you should have asked a
| real question
|
| Alright then.
|
| Pro-tip Remove that keybase from your profile, you look
| ridiculous.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Nobody is talking about that question. You received an
| answer to it already:
|
| > The thing that I have to install on MacOS so that I can
| run docker. Is there any other way(i.e no gui utility) ?
|
| We're talking about your subsequent reply asking a
| further question. A question that has no relevancy to or
| answer for macOS for reasons already discussed. As I said
| before, if you wanted a real answer then you should've
| asked a real question.
|
| > Pro-tip Remove that keybase from your profile, you look
| ridiculous.
|
| Nobody asked for your unsolicited advice or opinions
| regarding Keybase or ones' use of it in their profile,
| thanks.
| adammarples wrote:
| What does apt do on macos
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Podman and Podman Desktop?
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| You can use Colima to get the same functionality, minus
| auto-start on boot.
|
| https://github.com/abiosoft/colima
| nerdponx wrote:
| I had problems pushing to AWS ECR from Colima and had to
| switch back to Docker Desktop. But for day-to-day usage
| it seemed to work great.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| I had to manually ln colima's docker.sock to the default
| to get AWS SAM to work. Regardless of setting the env
| variable or docker context, it would always try to use
| the default docker.sock.
|
| Might be a similar issue for ECR.
| [deleted]
| ketralnis wrote:
| https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop/
| satvikpendem wrote:
| It just goes to show how what enterprise customers value and
| what individual developers value are two very different things.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Yes very much. It's a whole new world selling enterprise vs
| anyone else.
|
| Small business selling is much more like selling to
| consumers.
| jchw wrote:
| The problem I have with Docker is very simple; to individual
| users, they provide a service invaluable in a similar vein,
| though not of similar importance necessarily, to Wikipedia or
| Archive.org; Docker is literally a utility, which can enable
| tons of different interactions. The open source community is
| flooded with different ways to use Docker and take advantage
| of OCI images and whatnot. I just recently gave distrobox a
| spin, for example. I use Podman as my container engine, but
| the theory is the same, and most of the images are on
| Dockerhub.
|
| The problem here is simple; it only provides this immense
| value if it is effectively free without discrimination. But
| of course, it can't really just be free, or at least
| Dockerhub certainly can't be.
|
| On the other hand, it also provides immense value to
| enterprise and even smaller customers, too, clearly. And I
| don't think anybody ever strongly doubted _that_ aspect, it
| just was more doubted whether you could make a business out
| of it. But lo and behold, Dockerhub was integrated enough
| into the ecosystem and without an a strong enough alternative
| that it didn 't seem to matter.
|
| I assume Docker Desktop also factors into this somehow, but I
| don't know. I don't use it. Even on Windows and macOS, in the
| event I must use them to do dev work, I just use Podman
| Machine. Works well enough for me, and I don't care about a
| desktop UI (although apparently a couple do exist.)
|
| I am glad that at the end of the day, I haven't seen any
| super bad fallout from this. I'm still able to use Docker
| images on my NAS without paying a monthly subscription.
| Whatever their rate limit is, I'm not hitting it. I'm sure
| it's a super bad pain in the ass for certain parties though.
| Like I bet GitHub has a deal to keep Dockerhub unlimited in
| it's CI, but smaller providers that do CI like srht are
| probably screwed. That's a shame for the entire ecosystem.
| ilyt wrote:
| Counter-point: most of the value is "a repository of
| images" and that's just hard sell to pay massive extra
| (over just "a local VM with some code running" or some of
| the cloud offerings) for a _essentially_ S3-like file
| storage with slightly different API and some structure.
|
| Yeah tools and common container format is why it got
| popular but with amount of alternatives that's not
| monetizable either.
|
| Docker desktop is a smart move honestly, monetize stuff
| around the containers (managing, making sure its secure)
| that _generally_ requires a lot of knowledge without it, so
| the pitch is not just "make the job easier" but "maybe
| allow company to skip hiring person(s) dedicated to running
| the whole house of cards"
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > The problem here is simple; it only provides this immense
| value if it is effectively free without discrimination. But
| of course, it can't really just be free, or at least
| _Dockerhub certainly can 't be._
|
| This is a self inflicted wound. They placed themselves
| there but never though about the costs of running a free
| service with PBs of traffic.
|
| > On the other hand, it also provides immense value to
| enterprise and even smaller customers, too, clearly
|
| And they should had taken money from enterprise from the
| day 1 for Hub services.
|
| Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but then I learned about
| Docker "eco-system" (especially things like Watchtower) the
| traffic costs was one of the first things what I though
| about.
| j-krieger wrote:
| Docker Desktop is a godsend. I live most of my developing
| life in my terminal, but the ability to glance into what's
| going on in different services along with mounts,
| environment variables and logging is invaluable.
| jchw wrote:
| I honestly can't relate very much. I can understand how
| it would help to be able to see the full breadth of what
| information there is to go along with containers, but A.
| I find Docker Desktop to be kind of annoying B. I
| actually feel like the CLI tool is well organized enough
| that it is not a problem to quickly grok what information
| I need using easy-to-remember commands.
|
| That said, Podman Desktop[1] does most of this stuff and
| it's free. Maybe it isn't as polished (Docker has
| definitely put a lot of engineering into the filesystem
| stuff on macOS for example) but to me it looks similarly
| nice to Docker Desktop. So if you are working as an
| individual and don't want to deal with licensing
| restrictions, there _is_ a reasonable alternative at
| least.
|
| [1]: https://podman-desktop.io/
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > A large chunk of the tech world today relies on their
| products, but they were making next to nothing for it.
|
| Yes, but only because they ran a massive marketing campaign,
| and then achieved market penetration as a result of years of
| developer cargo-culting.
|
| Containers have been around years before Docker, docker added a
| ton of bloat and a repository. So what? None of the
| predecessors (Jails, OpenVZ, etc.) needed tens of millions of
| dollars. Docker just capitalized on something that was open
| source and shamelessly monetized it. Great for them but not
| really worthy of admiration or anything to be remotely
| impressed by.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > Containers have been around years before Docker, docker
| added a ton of bloat and a repository. So what? None of the
| predecessors (Jails, OpenVZ, etc.) needed tens of millions of
| dollars. Docker just capitalized on something that was open
| source and shamelessly monetized it. Great for them but not
| really worthy of admiration or anything to be remotely
| impressed by.
|
| I think it's worth noting that the only thing they make much
| money off of now is their _desktop_ application.
|
| They made it possible for clueless users to "run containers"
| on Windows and Mac OS (nevermind it's just a Linux VM...).
| Technical users had long been capable of doing similar
| themselves with Linux or BSD or Solaris or what have you, but
| that's not the important piece of what Docker brought to the
| table.
|
| (And yes, many developers are "clueless users" when it comes
| to this sort of thing)
| twblalock wrote:
| I suspect the initial negative take on the license change was
| correct, and this is the dying gasp of the company.
|
| It's just taking longer than expected to replace Docker
| Desktop. But I am seeing a lot of progress on Podman and
| Rancher and a few others, and some of the larger tech companies
| are also building in-house replacements. A lot of the people
| who had to scramble to find a replacement are _not_ happy about
| it.
|
| In a year or two I think some of the companies that paid for
| licenses to avoid migrating are going to rethink their license
| costs, because the free alternatives will be just as good as
| Docker Desktop. Then we will see whether this revenue increase
| was sustainable or simply the transient result of holding
| customers hostage when they had no alternatives but to pay.
| uberduper wrote:
| Large companies took a while to figure out their replacement
| options, pick one, validate tooling, etc. They paid up early
| but they aren't paying again. Rancher on mac is basically a
| drop in replacement. With WSL on windows, docker desktop was,
| I assume, already unnecessary. The linux users were probably
| running docker engine this whole time anyway.
| roughly wrote:
| What gets me about this is the math doesn't make any sense.
|
| Docker charges $10/developer/month. Those developers are paid
| $150k+/yr, fully loaded to the company (insurance, taxes,
| accounting, etc) is probably double that, but call it
| $250k/yr to be nice. You take 3 developers and have them
| spend a quarter on replacing Docker Desktop, that's nearly
| $200k in developer costs spent replacing a tool that's gonna
| cost your 250 person company $30k/year.
|
| Docker wants you to pay $10/mo to make your $20k/mo developer
| more effective, and companies in our industry would rather
| spend several months of developer time building an
| alternative that they'll have to support forever and teach
| every new individual coming into the company how to use.
|
| For a group that seems to pride itself on math and logic and
| whatever, I don't understand what the hell we're thinking
| most of the time.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Amen. This is why I don't want to sell to developers.
|
| "Here's a solution that will save you hours every month,
| it's only $9 p/m."
|
| "$9 p/m???" - asked a developer choking on their avocado
| toast
|
| "That's the same price as Spotify! Meh, I can develop the
| same thing myself in 2 weeks."
|
| 2 months later.
|
| "Well, it's almost done. At least I won't be wasting $9
| p/m."
| paxys wrote:
| > 2 months later.
|
| > "Well, it's almost done. At least I won't be wasting $9
| p/m."
|
| That is wildly optimistic.
| skywhopper wrote:
| In my experience it's not developers who balk at such
| fees. Management gets very nervous about every $5 and
| $10/month tool that folks want to use and regularly
| insists on trimming seats.
| twblalock wrote:
| If you do the same math for a company with thousands, or
| tens of thousands, of developers, the answer looks
| different.
|
| Large companies already have dedicated teams for stuff that
| is a lot less critical than the container runtime.
|
| The companies that are too big to avoid paying, but too
| small to build a replacement, are the ones that are in a
| jam -- for now. But in a year or two, Podman or Rancher
| might might fully meet their needs. What should they do
| then? Continue to pay for Docker, or use a free and open
| source alternative that has feature parity?
| roughly wrote:
| Ok, I'll do the math:
|
| $250k/yr/developer, so for 1 quarter, that's $62.5k, 3
| developers for one quarter is $187.5k. Docker costs
| $10/mo, or $120/yr, so for 1000 developers, that's
| $120k/yr, or a payoff time of 1.5 years, assuming nobody
| ever has to touch anything ever again. Let's say our
| solution requires 1 developer-quarter per year to
| maintain - bugfixes, upgrades, deployments, etc. That's
| $62.5k/yr. That pushes our payoff time out to 2.5 years.
|
| Let's say our solution causes a net decrease in developer
| productivity of 1% (our solution has a bug that means
| things are slow for a day, developers can't google for
| easy answers, developers have to port things into our
| system) - that's a minute of extra work for every ~2hrs.
| That's 1000*250k*.01, or a net drain to the company of
| $2.5M/yr, which effectively pushes our payback time out
| to "never".
|
| Hell, we can even work the math the other way - for
| replacing Docker Desktop to be worthwhile, it's gotta
| cost less than $120/yr/developer. Developers cost
| $250k/yr, for call it 250 days of work per year, so
| $1000/day, or $125/hr, which means if the aggregate cost
| of our replacement to an individual user is even an hour
| per year, it wouldn't be worth doing for free. Add in the
| cost of actually having someone actually maintain our
| replacement product, and the math's even shittier.
| alexeldeib wrote:
| > Let's say our solution causes a net decrease in
| developer productivity of 1%
|
| This is an extremely aggressive assumption, and affects
| the entire equation. What happens when you achieve parity
| in 1 month, because actually, docker isn't that
| important? nerdctl + containerd basically eliminate my
| need for docker in a work context. nerdctl only for my
| local development.
|
| Tech companies with XX thousand employees already have
| dedicated infrastructure teams of all sorts. This math
| doesn't feel like it reflects reality of the _marginal
| costs_ and payoff time.
| cheriot wrote:
| I've had more productivity loss than that from docker's
| bugs and CPU/battery drain. We don't use docker in prod
| so why use it for dev? I need a container not this power
| hungry daemon and annoying UI.
|
| As I type this my laptop is hot because docker needs to
| be reset and restarted.
| vasco wrote:
| A big mistake with this math is that globally developers
| are not paid anywhere close to 250k/yr even fully loaded
| for the company. In my country in Europe it's closer to
| 60k/yr fully loaded. There is cheaper. Also most
| companies aren't gonna build something from scratch, they
| are going to use something else that is also available.
| That being said this type of exercise is good to show
| because many managers do not do it.
| [deleted]
| ahepp wrote:
| Is 1,000 employees a big tech company?
| paxys wrote:
| More users = greater need for dedicated support. A
| company that has tens of thousands of developers will
| need an entire team staffed up just to answer questions
| and troubleshoot issues with their homegrown Docker
| replacement, and the end result will be that the team
| gets laid off and the company just buys licenses because
| that is far cheaper.
| tester457 wrote:
| > For a group that seems to pride itself on math and logic
| and whatever, I don't understand what the hell we're
| thinking most of the time.
|
| Organizations are prone to bike shedding and forget about
| opportunity cost.
| mbreese wrote:
| And people (including developers) aren't always rational
| actors that act logically. Rightly or wrongly, there is a
| sense of fairness at play when something that was once
| free is no longer free. People aren't entitled to a free
| lunch, but once you have it, it's hard to take it away.
| Things like this can make even the most logical people
| act counterintuitively.
| [deleted]
| ilyt wrote:
| > that's nearly $200k in developer costs spent replacing a
| tool that's gonna cost your 250 person company $30k/year.
|
| the 250 person companies are not building the replacement,
| the 2k+ ones will. And likely ones that fit their internal
| architecture better so there are productivity gains to be
| had on top of that
| jvanderbot wrote:
| N employees, M internal tooling maintenance cost, Y for
| years.
|
| 120 * N * Y vs M * Y looks very attractive for large N and
| small M, esp when that 120 may suddenly increase without
| warning (again).
|
| It's still just math.
| keewee7 wrote:
| This article from 2013 might give an indication on why some
| people choose FOSS even when they can afford the non-FOSS
| solutions: The licensing. My God, the
| licensing. It's not so much the money, as the infernal,
| mind-bending tax code level complexity involved in making
| sure all your software is properly licensed: determining
| what 'level' and 'edition' you are licensed at, who is
| licensed to use what, which servers are licensed... wait,
| what? Sorry, I passed out there for a minute when I was
| attacked by rabid licensing weasels. I'm not
| inclined to make grand pronouncements about the future of
| software, but if anything kills off commercial software,
| let me tell you, it won't be open source software. They
| needn't bother. Commercial software will gleefully strangle
| itself to death on its own licensing terms.
|
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Everytime there is a price hike everyone complains that said
| product is dead and open source competitor will replace it.
| Nearly always, the people complaining aren't thinking about
| starting an open source project.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| I'm surprised by this as well, but maybe it was the HN bias
| that made that impression.
|
| My company received the memo from Docker to upgrade to paid
| version, and I helped many to move on to Podman. However there
| were teams for which getting a Docker Desktop license was
| easier than the Podman move. I am sure there are many more
| companies that can easily afford the convenience of Docker
| Desktop for a trivial fee.
| danieldk wrote:
| Right, $5/$9/$24 is nothing compared to a developer salary.
| So if developers switch to Podman, fixing the occasional
| glitch is going to be more expensive than a Docker
| subscription. E.g. a while ago there was a bug (caused by a
| qemu update) that didn't allow Podman to run when the VM used
| >=4GiB memory [1]. I can imagine that such an issue would
| result in a large amount of wasted time for triaging and
| working around this issue.
|
| Not meant negatively towards Podman, maintaining such a
| package in a constantly moving ecosystem is hard. The point
| is more that you pay Docker to do the extensive testing for
| you, so that the work-stopping issues are ironed out before
| they roll out to customers.
|
| [1] https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/14303
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Right, $5/$9/$24 is nothing compared to a developer
| salary.
|
| And yet there are horror stories of finance not approving
| purchases that would significantly improve productivity.
|
| While obviously greater than the $5/9/24 you bring up, I've
| heard of companies not wanting to buy a second monitor for
| their engineers, whereas I'd wager the productivity gain
| would pay for itself in only a couple months.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| What I don't understand is that devs that get paid 200k+
| complain about getting _any_ software license
| mathverse wrote:
| It is the license fuckery, being stuck on a single
| platform, having to pay for upgrades for no reason ( well
| alright I understand this but it honestly sucks. You
| usually dont need the features and are happy with what you
| used) etc etc
|
| Pricing virtual assets is hard
| jbverschoor wrote:
| I dunno.. maintanance, devops, companies keep having to
| pay for devs.. Hard to switch people.. It's kind of
| fuckery. It honestly sucks.
|
| //
|
| imo the thing to look out for is actual vendor /
| architecture lock-in. So just don't make things
| complicated yourself... Docker has it's uses, but right
| now it's being used for literally everything. I've been
| using jails, vms, and containers since the 90s. Docker is
| niceish, but somehow got lots of attention.
|
| Oh, and you need to be sure your platform won't eat all
| your revenue.. like oracle :)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| As long as you're building to OCI, you're fine.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Maybe because 200k+ is not net and if you weight in costs
| of living, costs of subscriptions for freaking everything
| nowadays, supporting family and other thousands of
| different things what's left is not so much anymore? Not
| every developer is 20 year old tech bro.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Bad take. It's a tool needed for the _business_ that the
| business is expected to pay for. The license belongs to the
| company not the employee.
| ghaff wrote:
| In principle, I agree with you. In practice, if there are
| cheap tools (or, more likely often less cheap services)
| to fulfill business requirements--and make things
| including things like traveling more pleasant--I'll often
| just pay out rather than dealing with approvals and
| requests which are often out of policy.
| ilyt wrote:
| Licenses are PITA to deal with regardless of how much
| you're being paid.
|
| _Especially_ on servers, and _especially_ if for some
| stupid reason licensed software need internet access to
| confirm it is licensed, coz that 's extra crap that needs
| to be added on proxy or firewalls and will inevitably break
| when they change something.
|
| If it's "hey, pay us X and we trust you don't cheat us"
| yeah, it's just extra invoice ,whatever.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| At work, I developed step by step instructions for using
| Docker on WSL2, the normal CLI way. People liked it, but
| figured they liked the GUI better. They also argued that they
| may as well stick to the GUI because there was a team
| somewhere else in the company that really insisted they
| _need_ Docker Desktop, so the company will be buying licenses
| anyway.
|
| (I was already working on those instructions when the pricing
| change reached our attention, so it became a viable free
| alternative only by coincidence, but still.)
|
| One other thing I learned: HN crowd is biased towards people
| who want to learn and understand their tools to a degree.
| Workplace use of Docker has large component of people who
| don't know what Docker is for and don't really care, but they
| need it for some task, so they want a hassle-minimizing
| option they can use to get their job done, and then forget
| about.
|
| I bet it's a huge market, not just for Docker, but any other
| software tool. One that's somewhat alien to the HN audience.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Docker (and podman for that matter) running on WSL2 need
| serious corporate investment in pairing it with wsl-vpnkit
| or a similar hack, publishing in Software Center and
| maintaining.
|
| At hindsight, I would say, it costs several man-months of
| senior engineers' with good connections in various
| departments.
|
| And this comes on top of productivity losses prior to the
| solution.
| trynewideas wrote:
| But isn't that the same vulnerability to Docker's business
| that Docker Swarm had?
|
| The whole of Docker Desktop isn't replaceable with a drop-in
| alternative today but parts of it are, and the rest could be
| very soon if an org with the resources and ability keeps
| developing things like podman.
|
| So what would Docker as a company do when the equivalent of
| what happens to Swarm happens to Desktop? Pivot again?
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| I really enjoy using docker compose to run most of my hobby and
| small project websites on small cloud nodes. With the remote
| builder functionality, it makes CICD and deployments trivially
| easy for me as well.
| bdcravens wrote:
| For the many here who have moved to an alternative (colima,
| Rancher, podman, etc), other than cost, is there a compelling (ie
| technical) advantage to these options? (on macos specifically)
| moduspol wrote:
| Kubernetes deprecated Docker support a few years back, so there
| will come a day that it may not be part of Docker Desktop.
|
| Rancher Desktop supports k3s with containerd out of the box,
| which has no announced deprecation.
|
| It's possible they plan to add containerd support to the built-
| in Kubernetes management of Docker Desktop once Docker is no
| longer supported, but I haven't heard about it.
|
| Beyond that, I'm not aware of any technical advantages. For me
| Rancher Desktop essentially covers 99% of what Docker Desktop
| did, so just knowing that there won't be a point where it'll
| cost money is valuable.
| justincormack wrote:
| (CTO of Docker here) Kubernetes moved Docker support out of
| the main repo, late last year. It is still supported and
| works, it is just an external repo now. As well as this
| Docker runs on containerd (which was originally a Docker
| project to work more closely with the Kubernetes project, now
| a CNCF project), and Docker Desktop now has a beta option to
| run the full containerd backend, including the image store,
| which we may well use to provide a common image store across
| Kubernetes and Docker engine in future, we are still
| exploring the many ways in which we can continue to improve
| the Kubernetes on Docker Desktop.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Yeah and everyone I know is moving to podman or colima
| hnarn wrote:
| > 254% YoY from ~$11M ARR in late 2020 to ~$135M at the end of
| 2022 just by flipping Docker Hub and Docker Desktop to paid for
| businesses
|
| I have never met a single person who pays, or works for a company
| that pays, for Docker Desktop. Why would you?
|
| Paying for Docker Hub seems like something that people do because
| they have to short-term, but there's no genuine selling point to
| it long-term and I suspect people will migrate to self hosted
| solutions if they have not already, so it doesn't strike me as
| particularly sustainable revenue.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > Paying for Docker Hub seems like something that people do
| because they have to short-term
|
| Huh? I normally pay for Docker for hosting container images for
| K8 to pull from there. Why wouldn't I pay.
| benatkin wrote:
| ...because GitLab also has a convenient container registry
|
| Also Google Cloud, Amazon, Azure, and even DigitalOcean.
| unity1001 wrote:
| Ok. Docker is also a convenient container registry. And its
| independent of ALL of those infrastructures so if i cancel
| any of them or move elsewhere, Im still good. So why should
| I not pay for Docker?
| hnarn wrote:
| > independent of ALL of those infrastructures
|
| Ok, so where is Docker Hub hosted? Do they run their own
| data centers?
| pwinnski wrote:
| Irrelevant, because if they move at some point in the
| future, users won't have to change anything.
| jen20 wrote:
| > independent of ALL of those infrastructures
|
| I want the container registry a local hop away from the
| thing using the images, not across the public internet...
| acdha wrote:
| > I have never met a single person who pays, or works for a
| company that pays, for Docker Desktop. Why would you?
|
| Because it's a hard requirement of the license and their
| salespeople will call your boss to ask why you're using the
| non-commercial install for company work?
| Patrol8394 wrote:
| I think they just cashed out; enterprise had to pay, for now,
| while evaluating and migrating to free alternatives. I don't
| think it will be a sustainable growth.
| hnarn wrote:
| My point exactly, I see very little proof that this is
| without a doubt a "reboot" of the company from a financial
| standpoint, it looks more to me like finding income out of
| desperation while doing nothing to improve the base value
| prop. But I could be wrong, I don't wish for Docker to fail
| more than anyone else.
| jitl wrote:
| The essential maxim in all the startup literature is
| "you're not charging enough". That was very much the case
| for Docker Desktop. At the current price there's gonna be
| churn but that's the case with anything customers pay for.
| jitl wrote:
| For a 100-300 developer company running macs, I don't think
| the current "free" alternatives would be less expensive than
| paying for Docker Desktop. I managed wrappers around Vagrant
| when Airbnb was that size and boy howdy did the whole org pay
| for every bit of the quality difference between
| Virtualbox+Vagrant and the Docker Desktop of today. I would
| rather buy a reliable GUI for fiddling and resetting the VM,
| wrangling file shares etc over implementing it myself. Maybe
| Colima will get much better but today doesn't seem like a
| good choice unless you're at 500+ devs and want to spend Dev
| Infra headcount polishing it up & supporting it.
| ilyt wrote:
| Well, check in a year when alternatives will have both
| userbase and time to develop.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Some teams in my company happily pay for Docker Desktop because
| of the ease. I know several other companies in Berlin that do
| that as well.
|
| There is a world outside FAANG and related companies that
| dominate HN mindspace.
| [deleted]
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| It's a value-add in macOS-heavy environments since it handles a
| lot of annoying cross-architecture VM and filesystem management
| for you under the hood. Of course teams can roll their own
| alternatives, but that takes more resources (i.e. effort,
| productivity, money) especially as the number of internal users
| you need to support grows.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| For companies that use macbooks docker for mac is still much
| better than the alternatives. It's really not that much $$ at
| the end of the day. If docker is affecting your bottom line the
| business is fundamentally flawed. It's not like the pricing is
| unreasonable.
| adriancr wrote:
| > I suspect people will migrate to self hosted solutions if
| they have not already,
|
| Docker hub is cheap enough and convenient enough to compete
| against self hosted.
|
| For self hosting you would need to manage/monitor, factor in
| redundancy, make it somehow easy to access to other tooling,
| etc...
|
| Just the redundancy and storage would be more then 7$ pro plan
| dockerhub has.
|
| If people already have setups in place for other things then it
| might make sense.
|
| Then there's aws ecr and others... I don't like things that can
| surprise me when it comes to billing.
| iancarroll wrote:
| > Why would you?
|
| Because the license often requires it.
| shoo wrote:
| i worked in a megacorp on a 1000 person initiative - with
| hundreds of developers - that had standardised on giving
| everyone macbooks, and many teams were using docker for mac to
| develop and run containerised integration tests locally. when
| the docker pricing model was announced, there seemed to be a
| pretty strong value proposition to just paying the monthly per-
| user license fee to continue using the software and not disrupt
| what teams were doing vs putting the effort into migrating to
| something else. what were the alternatives? develop a new
| linux+some other hardware soe, migrate everyone off the
| macbooks to that, then migrate to podman? etc. it could be done
| but the switch cost and effort would be a big distraction, and
| it'd require a lot of re-work and risk to reimplement all the
| enterprisey things that had been established for the macbook
| soe (like email, "endpoint protection", video conferencing,
| etc). another alternative could have been to burn a lot of
| engineering effort to eliminate the use of local container-
| based workflows, say, or for someone to build out a developer
| VM soe so that people could remote into linux machines to
| develop with podman.
|
| it was interesting that a lot of the docker pricing model is
| about container image storage in docker hub, in the enterprise
| context i was working in, that job was already been done by
| running private container registries in the chosen cloud
| vendor's platform, so the docker hub offering didn't really add
| any value.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Just like I don't know anybody that pays for Oracle...
|
| because I live in a bubble.
| hnarn wrote:
| Oracle had a 2022 yearly revenue of $42.4 billion. If Docker
| increased their revenue ten-fold it would still be around 40
| times smaller than Oracle.
| rat9988 wrote:
| It's still tangential to his point though.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Doesn't that prove the point however? If a company as large
| as Oracle has unseen customers, then Docker definitely
| does.
| tinco wrote:
| So you're saying they could grow to 1.2B ARR and you still
| wouldn't know anyone who would pay for it? I need to get in
| on this.
| schoolornot wrote:
| If they partner with the Business Software Alliance to start
| offering bounties, their revenue will drastically increase.
| They already proved not to give a crap about telemetry in their
| products. I bet they start using callhomes and registered IP
| space to figure out quick who is cheating.
| uzername wrote:
| I work at a pretty large corporation that uses docker desktop.
| The engineering team is in the low hundreds spread across the
| world. We happily pay for what we use and it's all great. We
| don't really use many features of docker desktop though. We have
| our own image space (ecr) and I don't think anyone is using or
| relying on extensions. I'm sure some team will eventually
| socialize an alternative. The reason we went through with paying
| for docker desktop was probably the lost time and productivity of
| transitioning off without due diligence dedicated on getting
| another option to work just as well. I don't know if our org gets
| customized pricing, but if it's $24/mo for us, that's maybe a 1/3
| of an hour of the least expensive run rate engineer we have
| (worldwide, again), per month. That's maybe 5 hours of run rate
| time per year per engineer. I can see why our org bought in at
| the time and continues.
|
| On a personal note, I was fine with the change, since it allowed
| personal use still with docker desktop. When Docker Desktop for
| Linux came out, I gave it a try on a clean server. Unfortunately,
| even on a fresh Ubuntu install with fresh hardware, the
| reliability of Docker Desktop for Ubuntu was awful, crashing
| every few days into a stalled state. I had to make a cron job to
| watch it and maintain it's uptime.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Do you/your corporation use Docker Compose?
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| When they started charging for Docker Desktop I immediately
| uninstalled it and just installed the cli-client on my mac
| machine, and started running Docker itself in an Ubuntu VM and
| set the $DOCKER_HOST on the host machine and do everything in the
| CLI.
|
| I question your competence if you can't run docker commands in a
| terminal and think $5 per month for a lousy electron app that
| wraps the commands with some buttons is good value. The fact they
| they are making $135M ARR and the company is valued at over a
| billion dollars is absolutely insane.
| moduspol wrote:
| I'll be interested to see how this turns out. This is already
| looking more positive for them than I expected.
|
| Rancher Desktop has been working great for me, so I'm not sure
| they'll be able to keep increasing their numbers with so closely
| comparable free competitors. I'd be curious what the breakdown is
| in terms of how much of their value is from Docker Desktop vs.
| Docker Hub vs. ancillary features.
| szastamasta wrote:
| Great to hear that. While I'm not a big fan of Docker desktop I
| really wish they restart docker swarm and kill thad abomination
| named Kubernetes.
|
| Docker compose and swarm are really cool technologies - easy to
| start with and more than enough for small and medium companies.
|
| I really hope they would bring it back and we start seeing
| managed swarm from cloud providers.
| marvinblum wrote:
| HashiCorp Nomad is a nice alternative is something you can look
| into if you're looking for a lightweight Kubernetes
| replacement. Also, it doesn't support everything Kubernetes
| does, it should be enough for most use cases.
| szastamasta wrote:
| Thanks, been thinking about it. It looks really nice, but
| it's really hard to beat how easily you can go from compose
| in local development to swarm on prod in small team.
| chromatin wrote:
| OTOH, you can go from Nomad in local development to Nomad
| in production pretty easily, too.
| sangeeth96 wrote:
| I'm skeptic how long this will last unless they bring out some
| cutting-edge innovations. I frankly used and loved Docker Desktop
| for a long time because it was the easiest way to get going and I
| believe even k8s is included now which is great for hobbyists and
| those who just want to get things done. But, I've been annoyed by
| the UX changes and the push to login to docker hub.
|
| While in 2023, there are most certainly great alternatives that
| are relatively easy to install from the terminal and get going, I
| guess there's not yet a definitive replacement that comes with
| the GUI too. Best I can think of is Podman Desktop Companion[1]
| but not sure how well this works.
|
| [1]: https://iongion.github.io/podman-desktop-companion/
| [deleted]
| mrjin wrote:
| There is a high cost of switching tech stack for companies,
| especially when availability of alternatives is unclear yet. So
| lots of companies will have no choice but pay for it.
|
| But for individuals it would be a complete different story. I've
| been playing with PodMan on linux in my home lab for a while now
| and I'm super happy with it, especially it doesn't need root in
| most of the cases.
| shaoonb wrote:
| Can't speak for anyone else, but my company is migrating away
| from Docker Desktop to Rancher in order to save money. We'll see
| how well that goes.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Can't speak for anyone else, but my company is migrating away
| from Docker Desktop to Rancher in order to save money.
|
| Their Rancher Desktop offering seems to be promising:
| https://rancherdesktop.io/
|
| Much the same way how Podman Desktop seems nice:
| https://podman-desktop.io/
|
| Though personally, Docker has always been a safe bet (both the
| desktop software, as well as the container runtime), I think
| I'll stick with it for a few years and let others take the
| early adopter risks, and use the alternatives when they've been
| more battle tested.
| [deleted]
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