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> there’s not a lawful basis unless advertising-cookies are suddenly the enabling technology behind downloadable containers.

Yes they are. Advertising cookies are how those downloadable containers are provided. That's an enabling technology. It wouldn't exist otherwise in the technology ghetto of the EU.

Docker got in as a container runtime, without any orchestration capabilities, then K8s came along to do orchestration but didn't provide it's own container runtime, so they used Docker.

After that there was some tension as Docker wanted to move "up the stack" to provide features like orchestration (with Docker Swarm) but the k8s community saw that as unecessary, they wanted a simple container runtime to sit under their orchestration layer.

Now we have options like cri-o or cri-containerd which are likely in the medium term to take over from Docker as the container runtime underneath Kubernetes installs. I'd expect that Docker will see more use in dev/test environments where full scale clusters are not required.

On the developer side I'm trying to build a artifact of my application which can run on servers. I'm probably using windows or osx as my development environment, and I'm probably targeting linux. So docker is a tool I can use to create a container to achieve my goal.

But it doesn't do a good job of that. The dockerfile format can be very frustrating to work with. And all the terminology sets a very high barrier of entry for usage. Yes its all googleable, but sometimes I think the solution is harder to use than the problem it set out to solve.

Go, Java, .Net, even javascript with Node, all do a much better job of making it easy for developers to build cross-platform applications. Without the need to learn an arcane file format and clumsy cli tool.

As an example of that frustration, building a cross-platform Go app is as easy as setting an environment variable. No additional configuration is required and there are no additional tools you need to install. The binary that is produced has everything it needs to run and can be deployed without having to use specialized tools.

Whereas building a Go app in a container with Docker means you end up retrieving all the dependencies every time and you get no package caching for builds so they take 10 minutes. For any large project you will inevitably break out your docker files into separate steps with some sort of make file. You will then bang your head against a wall for days trying to get docker in docker to work for your CI build system.

Is that really the best we can do?

But docker is also about isolation, file formats, conventions for deployments, protocols, etc. And yes it's a step forward in many ways. Containers are great for allowing the ops side to focus on running an application instead of making sure its configured properly.

But on so many of these dimensions docker has had major problems. It's not really safe to run arbitrary containers, so the isolation is an illusion. Because of the way the tooling works the containers are way too big and contain way too many unnecessary dependencies - which end up being security liabilities because they aren't upgraded often enough.

But ultimately docker turned out to be way too low level. It's why something like Kubernetes exists. It's a much higher level way of describing how an application should work.

So docker is getting pressure from both sides and that's why I think its days are numbered. The formats and conventions will stick around, but once they start requiring people to pay for the local development tool, everyone will move on and we'll stop talking about docker at all anymore.