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Docker's Second Death

tariqislam.com

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Re: Docker's Second Death

#32

I feel like I'm missing some key insight here. To me, the tl;dr of this post is: Kubernetes removed the need for Docker just to run container images in a k8s cluster, ergo, Docker is dead. But Kubernetes is super complicated . The author seems to assume that everybody wants to run everything in Kubernetes, but if I want to run some backend on some server (or maybe on a few servers), then it feels like extreme overkil…

But Kubernetes is super complicated. It can be, but running minikube or k3s on your laptop is trivial, and what you do with them transfers very easily to real Kubernetes.

I remember trying to set up k3s a few months ago and encountered a hard error that gave zero results when googling. I don't remember the error anymore. Was not impressed though and would not call it trivial to set up.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Kubernetes is super complicated. It can be, but running minikube or k3s on your laptop is trivial, and what you do with them transfers very easily to real Kubernetes.

I remember trying to set up k3s a few months ago and encountered a hard error that gave zero results when googling. I don't remember the error anymore. Was not impressed though and would not call it trivial to set up.

I use mini cube and It went pretty smoothly.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Kubernetes is super complicated. It can be, but running minikube or k3s on your laptop is trivial, and what you do with them transfers very easily to real Kubernetes.

Will that allow me to ship software to servers (not enormous clusters, I mean like a couple of VMs somewhere) without having to first become a Kubernetes expert? I mean, that was one of the key Docker promises, and they delivered to quite an extent.

You want helm or one of the many, many tools built on top of kubernetes to ease the deployment of applications. All of the same complexity of deploying services was there with docker, you were just insulated and hidden from it by some of its opinions. Whether you want to or not, if you want to manage costs and performance of your app you're going to need to learn (or pay people who have learned) about how to deploy and manage apps in production at scale.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#37
post #6

So, what's the better business model for a low-level piece of infrastructure like Docker?

Docker, Inc. has the opportunity to be the NPM, Inc. for container images. How much did NPM sell to GitHub for? Less concretely, is there a business model for a low-level piece of infrastructure like Docker? Is there a business model for ncurses or readline or df or ls? "Real world" infrastructure is typically high capex, low margin. How many VC-funded startups build bridges or tunnels? SpaceX is pivoting to Starlink…

The business model for infra software is to get (aqui)hired by a company with a service business model.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#38

I enjoyed the following: > Though it [Docker] does live on strongly within CI/CD ecosystems and, ostensibly, the inner loop of development thanks to the de facto standard Dockerfile. Docker will still live on for both Windows and Mac developers. As a platform for running production code it might be dead or dying, but as an ecosystem and a development tool it will continue to live and probably thrive. Docker is still…

Take this post with a hint of bias as it's written by a Red Hat'er - if you ask an employee what the "next thing" is, I wouldn't be surprised to hear "podman" (which is an opinionated docker clone)

The number of Docker Desktop installations and the popularity of local Kubernetes tools (think KinD, k3d) show that "Docker got boring" which is an aspiration for infrastructure tooling.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#39
post #6

So, what's the better business model for a low-level piece of infrastructure like Docker?

Docker, Inc. has the opportunity to be the NPM, Inc. for container images. How much did NPM sell to GitHub for? Less concretely, is there a business model for a low-level piece of infrastructure like Docker? Is there a business model for ncurses or readline or df or ls? "Real world" infrastructure is typically high capex, low margin. How many VC-funded startups build bridges or tunnels? SpaceX is pivoting to Starlink…

I don’t think there is anything wrong with their margins - their costs are way below anyone else’s. I think the rationale behind Starlink is to soak up their excess capacity while the market demand for space access grows in response to their increasingly low prices.

But I agree that in general, “real world” infrastructure is low margin, I think that’s because it’s completely undifferentiated and has become a commodity

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