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Docker's Second Death

tariqislam.com

51–60 of 286 posts

Re: Docker's Second Death

#51

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…

There’s no need for them to live on. There are open source alternatives that mimic Docker exactly. In fact on Fedora[1] the “docker” cli command is actually buildah and podman (you actually can’t install Docker on Fedora anymore - I genuinely haven’t noticed a difference). The commands are exactly the same right down to the command starting with the word “docker”.

I don’t wish them ill, but literally everything has been replicated. If they fail as a company it won’t matter to developers who don’t use their enterprise software.

I actually think the company isn’t long for this world. It wouldn’t surprise me if they got bought for a paltry sum in the next few years.

Their lasting legacy is that most software and people assume that a shortened container image points to docker.io.

1 https://fedoramagazine.org/docker-and-fedora-32/

Re: Docker's Second Death

#52
post #6

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

It depends on what that infrastructure is. Docker owes its existence to the OS not providing an adequate interface to create lighter containers than 00's style virtual machines. They chose to be imported and used as part of the stack by kubernetes instead of offering a better solution, which was clearly where kubernetes was headed. This one is less of a model question, than a market position question. Elastic, on the…

>Elastic on Amazon is a great gateway drug to Elasticco's offerings.

Why is that? Is amazon not able to run it properly?

Re: Docker's Second Death

#53

So what should we use for a local "kubernetes" stand in on mac os?

This article seems to be focusing on using Docker on production servers, rather than as a Developer tool, which is where Docker the company are focused now.

As a developer tool I'm not aware of another option which has a similar setup. You can , of course, manually spin up VMs and install kind/minikube/k3s on them, but that may be more work than you want.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#54
post #51

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…

There’s no need for them to live on. There are open source alternatives that mimic Docker exactly. In fact on Fedora[1] the “docker” cli command is actually buildah and podman (you actually can’t install Docker on Fedora anymore - I genuinely haven’t noticed a difference). The commands are exactly the same right down to the command starting with the word “docker”. I don’t wish them ill, but literally everything has b…

> you actually can’t install Docker on Fedora anymore

Moby is docker effectively. Your link describes how to install docker on Fedora.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#55
post #6

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

Dev-tooling. I would have expected them to come up with something like https://www.testcontainers.org/ and sell enterprise/community licenses, just like they do with their cross platform clients. Enterprises need support, and by creating a rich suite of products that become essential to developers, they could have maybe really stuck (hard to predict what could happen).

Instead they tried really hard to make docker swarm a thing while kubernetes started taking off. To be sure, at the time, it wasn't clear which platform would succeed, and I remember that a certain OpenStack project tried to support both (like all OpenStack projects that try to be everything to everyone). Kubernetes has a lot of concepts that need to be learned, so the barrier to entry was much higher, and docker swarm seemed more straightforward.

All devs loved docker right away but in the early days I remember there being a lot of blogs about NOT running containers in production because of all the security issues. Kubernetes made that problem go away. It got adoption by different cloud providers which made it easy to deploy/use on their platform. That was maybe a tell: if devs loved docker so much and kubernetes was the tool that cloud providers supported, they could have focused on the former.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#57
post #51

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…

There’s no need for them to live on. There are open source alternatives that mimic Docker exactly. In fact on Fedora[1] the “docker” cli command is actually buildah and podman (you actually can’t install Docker on Fedora anymore - I genuinely haven’t noticed a difference). The commands are exactly the same right down to the command starting with the word “docker”. I don’t wish them ill, but literally everything has b…

buildah/podman/skopeo are nice tech. and all, but they don't exactly mimic the setup of Docker for Windows/Mac.

If for no other reason that, they don't do Windows containers :) I know of quite a few corps using Windows containers in prod. now, take up may have been slow, but it's happening.

Also Docker for Windows/Mac have an easier install/setup process than manually setting up VMs and installing tools on them.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#59

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.

Author here. I no longer work for Red Hat these last few years, and my words are strictly my own. I wanted to communicate what's happening now in the context of what I experienced from Docker's early days in the industry.

Re: Docker's Second Death

#60

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

I find quite cute that in 2020 people are still echoing this to the extent that now I have to answer questions like "explain what kubernetes is" during job interviews.

To me seems that a bigger group of people get jealous about a smaller group getting new tools. Then this "stuff x is complicated" propaganda is passed on through the industry like the plague.

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