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What has Docker become?

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Re: What has Docker become?

#121

Post by bmitch3020 »

Another year, another story written about the demise of Docker. This has been happening since before Kubernetes took off. My own take:

Docker had a choice of markets to go after, the enterprise market was being dominated by the hyperscalers pushing their own Kubernetes offerings. So they pivoted to focus on the developer tooling market. This is a hard market to make work, particularly since developers are very famous for not paying for tooling, but they appear to making a profit.

With Docker Hub, it's always been a challenge to limit how much that costs to run. And with more stuff being thrown in larger images, I don't want to see that monthly bill. The limits they added hurt, but also made a lot of people realize they should have been running their own mirror on-prem, if not only to better handle an upstream outage when us-east-1 has a bad day.

Everything else has been pushing into each of the various popular development markets, from AI, to offloading builds to the cloud, to Hardened Images. They release things for free when they need to keep up with the competition, and charge when enterprises will pay for it.

They've shifted their focus a lot over the years. My fear would be if they stayed stagnant, trying to extract rents without pushing into new offerings. So I'm not worried they'll fail this year, just like I wasn't worried any of the previous years when similar posts were made.

Re: What has Docker become?

#122

Post by pploug »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #12

- well time to announce DockerVM, a super fast under 100ms boot time competitor to firecracker and gvisor and try selling this to some of the cloud providers out there - take advantage of the current agentic wave and announce a Docker Sandbox runner product that lets you run agents inside cloud sandboxes

https://docs.docker.com/ai/sandboxes/

Re: What has Docker become?

#123

Post by kccqzy »

oarsinsync wrote: post #100
kccqzy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot install it as nonroot user Sure you cannot install docker or podman as a non-root user. But take your argument a bit further: what if the kernel is compiled without cgroups support? Then you will need root to replace the kernel and reboot. The root user can do arbitrarily many things to prevent you from installing any number of software. The root user can prevent you from using arbitrary already installed…

> It is astounding to me that someone would complain that a non-root user cannot install software. Depends on what you mean by "install software". If your definition is "put an executable in a directory that is in every other user's standard $PATH", then yes, this is an absurd complaint. Of course only root should be able to do this. If your definition is "make an executable available to run as my user", then no, thi…

I don’t think you understood my comment.

> You absolutely should not need root to be able to run software that doesn't require root privileges.

But root can approve or disapprove you running that software. Have you heard of SELinux or AppArmor? The root user can easily and simply preventing you from running an executable even as your own user.

A malware can run as your own user and exfiltrate files you have access to. The malware does not need root privileges. Should root have the capability to prevent the malware from being installed? Regardless of what your definition of “install” is, the answer is unequivocally yes.

Re: What has Docker become?

#124

Post by Someone »

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…

> if we were running the version of Docker Desktop after the commercial licensing requirement change, they sent a 30 day notice to license the product or they’d sue.

What exactly are you objecting to? Since you say “I’m fine with the idea that licensing Docker and Docker Desktop is a good thing to do” it’s not the change, so what is it? The 30 days, them saying they would sue after that, or the tone?

I haven’t seen the messages so I cannot comment on that, but if you accept that the licensing can be changed, whats wrong with writing offenders to remind them to either stop using the product or start paying? And what’s wrong with giving them 30 days, since, in my memory, they announced the licensing change months in advance?

Re: What has Docker become?

#125

Post by shykes »

bmitch3020 wrote: post #90
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…

I agree with a lot of the above, but then there's: > Docker is still maintaining the runtime on which orbstack, podman etc are all using, and all the cloud providers are using I need to fact check that one. runc was donated by Docker to OCI a while back. And containerd was created under the CNCF from a lot of Docker code and ideas. podman is sitting on the RedHat containers stack, which has their own code base. Docke…

> containerd was created under the CNCF from a lot of Docker code and ideas

No. containerd was created by Docker, as part of a refactoring of dockerd, then later donated to cncf. Over time it gained a healthy base of maintainers from various companies. It is the most successful of Docker's cncf contributions. But it was not created under the CNCF.

Re: What has Docker become?

#126

Post by eigencoder »

skwashd wrote: post #85

A few times I've wondered, where would Docker Inc be today if Microsoft acquired them back in 2017? Early 2017 was peak Docker and Docker Inc. Those were the days. Container hype was everywhere. Before moby. Before all the pivots. Microsoft was embracing open source and the cloud. They were acquiring dev tools. It was a missed opportunity for both companies.

I don't want Microsoft's fingers all over docker -- if anything that would have accelerated the rise of e.g. podman

Re: What has Docker become?

#127

Post by FireBeyond »

cpuguy83 wrote: post #105
IshKebab wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm no. Podman is a different product that is pretty much a drop-in replacement for Docker but lets you run as non-root. You have to be root to set it up, but after that you don't need any special privileges. With Docker the only option is to basically give everyone root access. It's true that it requires root for some setup though. Unclear if op was complaining about that.

Docker can run rootless the same way podman does.

Now. I was at Red Hat at the time, in the BU that built podman, and Docker was just largely refusing any of Red Hat's patches around rootless operation, and this was one of the top 3, if not the top motivation for Red Hat spinning up podman.

Re: What has Docker become?

#128

Post by shykes »

radioradioradio wrote: post #111
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.

OP is wrong. Docker created containerd, then donated to cncf, then other contributors joined.

Re: What has Docker become?

#130

Post by mikepurvis »

FireBeyond wrote: post #118
cpuguy83 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've really appreciated RH's work both on podman/buildah and in the supporting infrastructure like the kernel that enables nesting, like using buildah to build an image inside a containerized CI runner.

That said, I've been really surprised to not see more first class CI support for a repo supplying its own Dockerfile and being like "stage 1 is to rebuild the container", "stage two is a bunch of parallel tests running in instances of the container". In modern Dockerfiles it's pretty easy to avoid manual cache-busting by keying everything to a package manager lockfile, so it's annoying that the default CI paradigm is still "separate job somewhere that rebuilds a static base container on a timer".

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