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What has Docker become?

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Re: What has Docker become?

#111

Post by radioradioradio »

radioradioradio wrote: post #82

Seems like (according to the author) whatever docker is doing it is a sign of their immediate demise and everyone on HN is cheering for the company to go down in flames no matter what. The tech is open source and free forever - thats somehow a problem? The company monitised enterprise features, while keeping core and hub free - also a problem? Is exploring AI tools, like everyone else is? should they not? should they…

to the respondants above - you are right - that lacked nuance

Look at the maintainer lists of containerd and moby, which are used by loads of others, several docker employees on those lists - I didn't check what their amount of involvement is compared to other companies, nor whether they are even sanctioned by docker to do the work, but afaik those projects came out of OCI with Docker as one of the primary backers.

Re: What has Docker become?

#112

Post by bmitch3020 »

zoobab wrote: post #16

Who wants to pay for chroot?

You're missing image distribution, namespaces (networking, pids, mount, users), seccomp (to limit root powers), cgroups (to limit cpu and memory usage), and so much more. There's also Docker Hub with the official images they maintain. And the Desktop tooling makes an embedded Linux VM much easier to work with than spinning up your own VM, copying files around, and forwarding networking ports.

Re: What has Docker become?

#113

Post by steve1977 »

Moto7451 wrote: post #36

One thing that really hurt them from my PoV was how they acted when they changed their licensing structure with respect to revenue generating companies. I’m fine with the idea that licensing Docker and Docker Desktop is a good thing to do. However, I think they just made people distrust their motives with their approached to this. At two places I worked their reps reached out to essentially ensnare the company in a s…

So they have become Oracle...

Re: What has Docker become?

#114

Post by nyrikki »

dralley wrote: post #63
mg794613 wrote: post #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…

It didn't help them that they rejected the traditionally successful ways of monetizing open source software. Which is, selling support contracts to large corporate users. Corporate customers didn't like the security implications of the Docker daemon running as root, they wanted better sandboxing and management (cgroups v2), wanted to be able to run their own internal registries, didn't want to have docker trying to f…

Unfortunately even podman etc.. are still limited by OCIs decision to copy the Docker model.

Crun just stamp couples security profiles as an example, so everything in the shared kernel that is namespace incompatible is enabled.

This is why it is trivial to get in-auditable communication between pods on a host etc…

Re: What has Docker become?

#115

Post by ajcp »

dangus wrote: post #76
b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Due to the usual “mid size software company not micromanaging the developers” standard You didn't have a device management system or similar product managing software installs (SCCM in Windows land)? That's table stakes for any admin.

Device management != micromanaging developer workflow. At my midsize company, our engineers could absolutely say something like “we don’t like Terraform Cloud, we want to switch to OpenTofu and env0” and our management would be okay with it and make it happen as long as we justify the change. We wouldn’t even really have to ask permission if the change was no cost.

-> and make it happen.

I think OPs point is they failed on this part. "Making it happen" should have been ensuring a compliant and approved version of the software was the one made available to the developers. At a large scale that is done via device management, but even at a medium sized enterprise that should have been done via a source management portal of some sort.

Re: What has Docker become?

#116

Post by JeremyNT »

mg794613 wrote: post #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…

> 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.

Yes. It was a helpful UI abstraction for people uncomfortable with lower level tinkering. I think the big "innovations" were 1) the file format and 2) the (free!) registry hosting. This drove a lot of community adoption because it was so easy to share stuff and it was based on open source.

And while Docker the company isn't the behemoth the VCs might have wanted, those contributions live on. Even if I'm using a totally different tool to run things, I'm writing a Dockerfile, and the artifacts are likely stored in something that acts basically the same as Docker Hub.

Re: What has Docker become?

#117

Post by godzillabrennus »

embedding-shape wrote: post #77
godzillabrennus wrote: post #68

I switched to Podman on Windows and found it less laggy, and it works fine for local development. I'm sure I'm missing some features, but as Docker continues to struggle to generate revenue, the open-source option will be important to an increasingly large part of the industry. FYI- If I was docker, I'd stand up some bare metal hosting (i.e., a Docker Cloud) designed around making it easier for novice developers to t…

> but the hole in the market is vibe coders who want to launch a web app vibe coded but don't know how to deploy containers to the cloud without a steep learning curve Is it really a hole? I'm not the target user, but I keep coming across "Build & deploy your own platform/service/application with VibeCodingLikeThereIsNoTomorrow" and similar, maybe new one every week or so.

Seems like its a hole in the market if new services are cropping up. If there wasn't a hole then established clouds would have this. I don't have to think if I want a virtual machine booted with Ubuntu. I can do that in any cloud. How many have vibe coding support to launch containers that work locally in a cloud so they are accessible as a website? How many of those have a build process that does security checks and helps patch the code and automates building browser tests to verify the functionality keeps working (or kicks it back to the coding agent to fix)? Basically, the last 10% of the vibe coding a web app locally that isn't automated. This is a big opportunity for a semi established vendor like Docker that a startup would need users and capital (for bare metal) to fix. Two things that a Docker has at their disposal.

Re: What has Docker become?

#118

Post by FireBeyond »

cpuguy83 wrote: post #98
dralley wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't help them that they rejected the traditionally successful ways of monetizing open source software. Which is, selling support contracts to large corporate users. Corporate customers didn't like the security implications of the Docker daemon running as root, they wanted better sandboxing and management (cgroups v2), wanted to be able to run their own internal registries, didn't want to have docker trying to f…

Absolutely none of this is true. Docker had support contracts (Docker EE... and trying to remember, docker-cs before that naming pivot?). Corporate customers do not care about any of the things you mentioned. I mean, maybe some, but in general no. That's not what corps think about. There was never "no interest" at Docker in cgv2 or rootless. Never. cgv2 early on was not useable. It lacked so much functionality that v…

I mean you can say that, but on the topic of rootless, regardless of "interest" at Docker, they did nothing about it. I was at Red Hat at the time, a PM in the BU that created podman, and Docker's intransigence on rootless was probably the core issue that led to podman's creation.

Re: What has Docker become?

#119

Post by Joel_Mckay »

bmitch3020 wrote: post #103
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gordon was the office pet tortoise if I recall, and might still be around given they may live a very long time. Thus it became the default user in parts of their software. =3

Gordon unfortunately passed away in 2023: https://x.com/solomonstre/status/1637537983988629504

In a way, it is fun the memory still affects design choices. =3

Re: What has Docker become?

#120

Post by someone7x »

Moto7451 wrote: post #36

One thing that really hurt them from my PoV was how they acted when they changed their licensing structure with respect to revenue generating companies. I’m fine with the idea that licensing Docker and Docker Desktop is a good thing to do. However, I think they just made people distrust their motives with their approached to this. At two places I worked their reps reached out to essentially ensnare the company in a s…

> they sent a 30 day notice to license the product or they’d sue

This tracks with what I saw, one day there was an email sent out to make sure you don’t have docker desktop installed.

It was wild because we were on the heels of containerize-all-th-things push and now we’re winding down docker?? Sure whatever you say boss.

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