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What has Docker become?

tuananh.net

41–50 of 286 posts

Re: What has Docker become?

#41
post #9
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open infrastructure is hard to monetize. But not impossible. Terraform seems to have paid its creator quite well.

I think Hashicorp got out just in time. They are declining in recent years.

They're IBM now, I think they just consider you and me beneath their notice. I guess some things never change.

Re: What has Docker become?

#42
> Docker’s journey reads like a startup trying to find product-market fit, except Docker already had product-market fit

Strongly disagree. The core Docker technology was an excellent product and as the article says, had a massive impact on the industry. But they never found a market for that technology at any price point that wasn't ~free, so they didn't have PMF. That technology also only took off in the way it did because it was free and open source.

Re: What has Docker become?

#43
post #13

Sorry off topic question but has Docker come up with a easy to use dev solution. I always end up with using Devcontainer: it solves the sandboxed, ready to use dev env. But the actual experience with developing on VSCode with Dev Containers is not great. It's laggy and slow.

Devcontainers are great for me on windows and macos. What stack are you using?

Re: What has Docker become?

#44
post #35

What I hate about docker and other such solutions is that I cannot install it as nonroot user, and that it keeps images between users in a database. I want to move things around using mv and cp, and not have another management layer that I need to be aware of and that can end up in an inconsistent state.

https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorial...

Re: What has Docker become?

#45
"The problem is that Docker the technology became so successful that Docker the company struggled to monetize it. When your core product becomes commoditized and open source, you need to find new ways to add value."

No, everything was already open source, other had done it before too, they just made it in a way a lot of "normal" users could start with it, then they waited too long and others created better/their own products.

"Docker Swarm was Docker’s attempt to compete with Kubernetes in the orchestration space."

No, it never was intended like that. That some people build infra/business around it is something completely different, but swarm was never intended to be a kubernetes contender.

"If you’re giving away your security features for free, what are you selling?"

This, is what actually is going to cost their business, I'm extremely grateful for what they have done for us. But they didn't gave themselves a chance. Their behaviour has been more akin to a non-profit. Great for us, not so great for them in the long run.

Re: What has Docker become?

#46

I used to be very enthusiastic about docker compose, but I've been playing around with nix + process-compose lately and its pretty great. I can have k3s and tilt in there only when it's necessary--which it's usually not.

Nix is wonderful for reproducible and declarative infrastructure, but how do you manage multiple server instances with it? I have a handful of projects active at any time, and am currently running four web servers, three mysql instances, two postgres, and a partridge in a pear tree. Should I run Nix in Docker, Docker from Nix, or is there a nix-only solution for this?

I may misunderstand your problem, but I just have a configuration repository for various "hosts". There are a couple of settings I share between them, and then just specify the differences.

"Deploying" one is as simple as `nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#hostName`

Re: What has Docker become?

#47

I used to be very enthusiastic about docker compose, but I've been playing around with nix + process-compose lately and its pretty great. I can have k3s and tilt in there only when it's necessary--which it's usually not.

Nix is wonderful for reproducible and declarative infrastructure, but how do you manage multiple server instances with it? I have a handful of projects active at any time, and am currently running four web servers, three mysql instances, two postgres, and a partridge in a pear tree. Should I run Nix in Docker, Docker from Nix, or is there a nix-only solution for this?

There are tools such as deploy-rs, colmena, and morph that let you deploy nixOs configs using nix. I can't speak to how good they are personally, I use ansible to push my nix configs.

Re: What has Docker become?

#48
post #3

> Docker created a standard so successful that it became infrastructure, and infrastructure is hard to monetize Open infrastructure is hard to monetize. Old school robotics players have a playbook for this. You may or may not agree DBs are infra but Oracle has done well by capitalistic standards. The reality is in our economy exploitation is a basic requirement. Nothing says a company providing porcelain for Linux ke…

Imo the problem with SaaS products is that their revenue expectations are priced accordingly to the market they serve, not the money it takes recreating them. If I wrote the best word processor in the world, I could probably sell it for a decent sum to quite a few people. However if I expressed my revenue expectations as a percentage of revenue from the world's bestselling novels, I would be very quickly disappointed…

This is a great way of framing it that I'd never thought of before.

I worked in engineering software for a long time and because of who we sell to, there's always been a very hard cost-benefit analysis for customers of SaaS in that space. If customers didn't see a saving equal to more than the cost of the software in Y1 they could and would typically cancel.

Re: What has Docker become?

#49
I just want to disable "Ask Gordon" in the sidebar. I don't want to see it. My brain works in weird ways. Whenever I see a name for the first time I attach that person to it.

Gordon is the character from Half Life.

Docker a piece of software. Don't anthropomorphize it.

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