Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 597 posts

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#211

Post by oneplane »

CyanLite2 wrote: post #193
namdnay wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s assuming some kind soul in engineering management has the patience and leverage to guide this through 10 layers of purchasing, procurement, finance, legal etc… Another likely outcome is that it’s “easier” for teams to switch to another tool (easier in that at least they’re not waiting on a third party for approval) and everyone loses a lot of time Big corporations are not the most efficient beasts for this kin…

Perhaps you're not understanding corporate bureaucracy. Nobody wants to be the manager who gets fired for trying to save $25k by switching from Docker Desktop to {insert random open source project here}. Not only is it not worth the time or the risk, but the engineering manager's exact purpose is to traverse the corporate bureaucracy. It gives them job security. Plus the engineering manager can negotiate big discount…

That is not the point he was making. It's about wanting to get the licenses procured but the process being unreasonably laborious so people just don't bother. The problem isn't cost, it's the mess of corporate wastelands.

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#212

Post by treeman79 »

jdwithit wrote: post #177
namdnay wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s assuming some kind soul in engineering management has the patience and leverage to guide this through 10 layers of purchasing, procurement, finance, legal etc… Another likely outcome is that it’s “easier” for teams to switch to another tool (easier in that at least they’re not waiting on a third party for approval) and everyone loses a lot of time Big corporations are not the most efficient beasts for this kin…

This poster has clearly worked at the same kind of companies I have. Plenty of them would gladly burn 10x what it would cost to just buy the damn license on engineering man-hours switching something that's inferior but free. Because it doesn't show up as an expense on the annual budget. The concept of opportunity cost is completely lost on a lot of business leaders.

I’ve seen companies burn half a million in developer time to save 10k or less several times.

Oh some JavaScript graphing library is expensive. Let’s roll our own!

Heroku meets our needs 100% let’s spend millions to switch to K8 and have a much worse experience.

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#213

Post by sneak »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #140
rcarmo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the Mac, just get Canonical’s Multipass ( http://multipass.run ) and do an apt-get to install Docker into a VM and use VS Code to “remote” to it. It will automatically install the Docker extension inside the Linux VM and you’re set. For Windows, use WSL2 and do the same. Both can mount “local” folders, although the setup is obviously different. You now have a better way to manage containers than ever before.

Why run Docker inside a VM on a Mac, when you can just run the Linux dev environment directly inside the VM? That's just starting to sound like Docker for the sake of Docker. Multipass, Qemu, and Parallels can all provide a solid VM on Mac host. All you need after that is your dev environment VM guest image to deploy to the team. https://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/Mac https://www.parallels.com/

Because the end result of a lot of workflows (eg k8s) is a buildable dockerfile, or built docker image for deployment.

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#214

Post by stevebmark »

qeternity wrote: post #130

So many people in this thread don’t understand how enterprise decisions get made. The business license costs $21/month, probably less in reality. Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year? Any alternative has switching costs and risks. Companies will just pay this. I see so many people saying “just do these 10…

What companies are offering $250k/year for engineers?

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#215

Post by PragmaticPulp »

namdnay wrote: post #158
qeternity wrote: post #130

So many people in this thread don’t understand how enterprise decisions get made. The business license costs $21/month, probably less in reality. Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year? Any alternative has switching costs and risks. Companies will just pay this. I see so many people saying “just do these 10…

That’s assuming some kind soul in engineering management has the patience and leverage to guide this through 10 layers of purchasing, procurement, finance, legal etc… Another likely outcome is that it’s “easier” for teams to switch to another tool (easier in that at least they’re not waiting on a third party for approval) and everyone loses a lot of time Big corporations are not the most efficient beasts for this kin…

I've been fortunate enough to work at companies where engineers were trusted to make small purchasing decisions. It works well for a while, but eventually everyone accumulates a lot of random recurring charges and the company cracks down.

$21 is nothing for a one-time spend.

$21 per month per employee is now $252/year per employee, but now you also need someone managing all of these licenses and accounting. Every new employee or team change requires some juggling of licenses with associated turn-around times before that person can get started.

It's not bad when it's just a couple key pieces of software, but it doesn't take long before every engineer has some mix of 20 different subscription tools and platforms and licenses and you're on the phone with a different vendor every week doing the annual subscription renewal pricing negotiation dance. The sales people know how this works and would prefer to wear you down with endless conference calls until you get tired of negotiating and just pay the new, higher price they're asking.

Soon, all of those "cheap" tools have added up to $1000/month or more per employee with a couple people dedicated to managing these licenses and negotiating with vendors all of the time. And it's terrible.

When the tool isn't easily replaceable, you deal with it. I'm not sure I see that with Docker Desktop, though. When you get a new hire, do you tell them to submit a ticket with licensing and wait until they can get their Docker Desktop license? Or do you simply write some documentation about how to accomplish tasks without using Docker Desktop so you can remove another external dependency? Teams generally gravitate toward the latter.

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#216

Post by yarcob »

chrisandchris wrote: post #129
zapita wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re going to spend scarce engineering resources reimplementing a Docker for Mac alternative, then roll out your immature alternative to 50+ engineers, instead of paying a few hundred dollars a month for a good product and moving on? It seems to me you would be the one cutting off your nose to spite your face in this scenario.

Assuming that you currently don‘t need any other than the functionality the free plan provides, and assuming all 50 engineers need a license, your „a few hundred dollars“ is actually $1‘250/month just for getting the same as before. I understand (in some way) the decision Docker made but I am not sure it is the way-to-go. However, it is a very hard question and if I had to pay a monthly fee for each component I‘m usi…

That 50 people team probably costs at least 250000/month. Are you going to take away a tool that everyone on the team needs to save 1250?

Or put another way, how much time would you need to replicate what Docker offers for a team of 50 people? If it takes more than 25% of the time of a single employee, then Docker is cheaper (assuming your employee costs $5000 a month, which I guess is a lower bound for an engineer).

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#217

Post by zerkten »

trey-jones wrote: post #161
eptcyka wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the value add for Docker Desktop? In a world where podman exists, what's the point of docker on dev machines anyway?

Well, I hadn't heard of podman until now, and I imagine I'm not the only one. Does it consistently have functional parity with docker?

It doesn't matter if it has parity of functionality when Docker has grown to the point where it has name recognition with enterprises and a sales team that can engage with these large customers.

It needs to have parity in all other pseudo-layers (3rd party tool support, support plans, OS support, someone to sign a contract with, compliance tools, etc.) We know most of these go unused or have no real meaning to devs, but they unlock enterprise procurement.

I believe podman has a linkage to RedHat which may actually bring all of the things that procurement want to hear, but the question is whether the door is open to RedHat, or not. Procurement departments can be fickle, preferring Oracle for everything or the other way round trying to eradicate Oracle while permitting a combination of others. It's all politics based on previous experiences and opinions in the end.

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#218

Post by techthumb »

dsjoerg wrote: post #159
SkyMarshal wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why run Docker inside a VM on a Mac, when you can just run the Linux dev environment directly inside the VM? That's just starting to sound like Docker for the sake of Docker. Multipass, Qemu, and Parallels can all provide a solid VM on Mac host. All you need after that is your dev environment VM guest image to deploy to the team. https://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/Mac https://www.parallels.com/

Some people here actually want and need Docker features. For me it's the ability to run from a given image and know that I've got _exactly_ the same image that other developers have. Reproducibility.

When I want a very specific version if the image, I use the SHA to pull/run

  $ docker pull hello-world@sha256:7d91b69e04a9029b99f3585aaaccae2baa80bcf318f4a5d2165a9898cd2dc0a1

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#219

Post by horsawlarway »

dsjoerg wrote: post #159
SkyMarshal wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why run Docker inside a VM on a Mac, when you can just run the Linux dev environment directly inside the VM? That's just starting to sound like Docker for the sake of Docker. Multipass, Qemu, and Parallels can all provide a solid VM on Mac host. All you need after that is your dev environment VM guest image to deploy to the team. https://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/Mac https://www.parallels.com/

Some people here actually want and need Docker features. For me it's the ability to run from a given image and know that I've got _exactly_ the same image that other developers have. Reproducibility.

I might be wrong, but I think his point is that by the time you're running a linux VM for docker, why not go ahead and get the rest of the tooling for free?

Docker can still be run in the VM just fine, for cases where you want a reproducible build environment.

I do this at any company that lets me (and by lets, I mean doesn't explicitly forbid) - They all give me a Mac, and the first (and sometimes only) thing I install is usually vmware fusion, followed by the linux distro of my choice (Arch).

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#220

Post by nicce »

yurishimo wrote: post #155
ben7799 wrote: post #147

We use Docker Desktop for the Mac at work. (Large company) Docker for Mac absolutely sucks. If they’re going to force everyone to pay they better start fixing bugs. They recently stopped allowing skipping a release unless you pay, and then promptly shipped a point release with a showstopper bug. I literally asked IT for a Linux VM/Cloud machine yesterday for development because my Mac is dead in the water due to a bu…

Yeah, that's probably not gonna happen. At the scale Docker is operating at now, the reason the Mac app sucks, is because it's really hard. They already have the resources to throw at this problem now and this is the product we have. This is purely a $$$ move (which is fine) but we shouldn't expect an order of magnitude more work going into the product as a result of this move, imo.

They are still looking for their business model, because they have no money. They have been unprofitable for their whole existence.
Post reply on HN