What has Docker become?

I think what happened to docker is a bit unfortunate. March 2013 — Docker goes public/open source at PyCon Nov 2013 — Jerry Chen pursues Docker, leads to Greylock Series B - Jan 2014 — Greylock Series B closes ($15M) - June 2014 — Kubernetes announced - July 2015 — Kubernetes 1.0 released.

Jerry is a good friend of mine and I think a great VC, he comes from the VMware world and was part of building the VMware enterprise strategy. When all the container stuff was all going down, I was trying to understand how digialocean needed to play in the container space - so I spent a lot of time talking to people and trying to understand it (decided we basically...shouldn't, although looked at buying Hashi) - but it was clear at the time the docker team went with Jerry because they saw themselves either displacing VMware or doing a VMware style play - either way, we all watched them start the process of moving to a real enterprise footing out of just a pure play devtool in 2014, it might have worked too (although frankly their GTM motions were very very strange), but Kubernetes..yah. You might recall Flo was on the scene too selling his ideas at Mesosphere, and the wonderful Alex Polvi with CoreOS. It was certainly an interesting time, I think about that period often and that it is a bit of a shame what happened to docker. I like Solomon a lot and think he's a genuinely genius dude.

> but swarm was never intended to be a kubernetes contender.

Your comment is accurate for the original Swarm project, but a bit misleading regarding Swarm mode (released later on and integrated into docker).

I have worked on the original Swarm project and Swarmkit (on the distributed store/raft backend), and the latter was intended to compete with Kubernetes.

It was certainly an ambitious and borderline delusional strategy (considering the competition), but the goal was to offer a streamlined and integrated experience so that users wouldn't move away from Docker and use Swarm mode instead of Kubernetes (with a simple API, secured by default, just docker to install, no etcd or external key value metadata store required).

You can only go so far with a team of 10 people versus the hundreds scattered across Google/RedHat/IBM/Amazon, etc. There were so many evangelists and tech influencers/speakers rooting for Kubernetes already, reversing that trend was extremely difficult, even after initiating sort of a revolution in how developers deployed their apps with docker. The narrative that cluster orchestration was Google's territory (since they designed Borg that was used at a massive scale) was too entrenched to be challenged.

Swarm failed for many reasons (it was released too soon with a buggy experience and at an incomplete state, lacking a lot of the features k8s had, but also too late in terms of timing with k8s adoption). However, the goal for "Docker Swarm mode" was to compete with Kubernetes.

And humans are just a wrapper around oxygen, food, and water.

Ah the classic "it's a terrible idea until you implement it elsewhere and show us up".

> Docker’s journey reads like a startup trying to find product-market fit, except Docker already had product-market fit - they created the containerization standard that everyone uses. 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.

I would argue the reverse: that Docker's value was itself the product-market fit. Docker the technology was commoditized and open-source almost from its genesis, because its technology had been built by Borg engineers at Google. It provided marginally more than ergonomics, but ergonomics was all it needed - the missing link between theory and practice.