What has Docker become? • Hacker News Board

Re: What has Docker become?

#171

Post by ChocolateGod » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

xeromal wrote: post #154

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…

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

It's not the 90s anymore.

Re: What has Docker become?

#172

Post by mikepurvis » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

FireBeyond wrote: post #137

mikepurvis wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 runnin…

Yeah, I've moved on from there, but I agree. There wasn't a lot of focus on the CI side of things beyond the stuff that ArgoCD was doing, and Shipwright (which isn't really CI/CD focused but did some stuff around the actual build progress, but really suffered failure to launch).

My sense is that a lot of the container CI space just kind of assumes that every run starts from nothing or a generic upstream-supplied "stack:version" container and installs everything every time. And that's fine if your app is relatively small and the dependency footprint is, say, But if that's not the case (robotics, ML, gamedev, etc) or especially if you're dealing with a slow, non-parallel package manager like apt, that upfront dependency install starts to take up non-trivial time— particularly galling for a step that container tools are so well equipped to cache away.

I know depot helps a bunch with this by at least optimizing caching during build and ensuring the registry has high locality to the runner that will consume the image.

Re: What has Docker become?

#173

Post by Conan_Kudo » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

ynx wrote: post #169

> 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 rev…

Well, technically the technology was originally built by IBM folks, as that's where LXC came from. But otherwise yes, your point makes sense.

Re: What has Docker become?

#174

Post by shykes » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #152

shykes wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

containerd is the lower half of dockerd, spun out by Docker as a standalone open source project. It remains a core component of Docker.

I stand corrected on that one, however it was then another piece of the stack they ended up losing as added value.

The spinning out of containerd is best understood in combination with the launch of Docker Desktop, which was not open source, and later became the main source of revenue.

Docker in its entirety was at risk of being wrapped as a commodity component. By spinning out lower-level components under a different brand, they (we) made it possible to keep control of the Docker brand, and use it to sell value-added products.

Source: I'm the founder of Docker.

Re: What has Docker become?

#175

Post by linkage » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

eigencoder wrote: post #129

thiagoperes wrote: post #22

Switched to OrbStack in one prompt using Claude. It’s a night and day difference

What's better about it?

The host actually gets RAM back after bursty workloads in the container thanks to memory ballooning. Containers also start up to 5x faster and `npm install` is also much faster because OrbStack uses macOS-specific APIs as much as possible.

Re: What has Docker become?

#176

Post by tracker1 » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

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…

I think what Docker should have done, is charge for Docker Desktop from the start... even $5/mo/user as a discount rate for non-open-source usage... similar for container storage, had a commercial offering for private containers from very early on.

The former felt like a rug pull when they did it later, and the latter should have been obvious from the start. But it wasn't there in the beginning and too many alternatives from every cloud provider popped in to fill that gap and it was too late.

There were a lot of cool ideas, and I think early on, they were more focused on the cool ideas and less on how to make it a successful, long lived business that didn't rely on VC funding and an exit strategy they didn't have to succeed.

Re: What has Docker become?

#177

Post by vivzkestrel » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 5:13 PM UTC

pploug wrote: post #122

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/

I was not aware of this one but I am talking about running it on the cloud like making a direct competitor to modal

Re: What has Docker become?

#178

Post by forty » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #168

> For developers, this doesn’t change much. Docker containers will continue to work, and the open source nature of Docker means the technology will persist regardless of what happens to the company. But it’s worth watching how Docker Inc’s search for identity plays out - it could affect the ecosystem of tools and services built around containers. Things will actually change quite a bit. First of all, millions of peop…

Why do you say podman is a poor replacement? It has been consistently a better replacement for me on Linux, with easy rootless, daemon less, quadlet, etc. And at work where I have to use macos, it works just as well.

Re: What has Docker become?

#179

Post by dec0dedab0de » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #124

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 t…

It's rude behavior, and generally not a good way to start a business relationship.

It reminds me of someone handing me something on the street then asking me to pay for it, whenever they do that I just throw whatever it is as far as I can and keep walking.

Re: What has Docker become?

#180

Post by Fabricio20 » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 5:21 PM UTC

szszrk wrote: post #53

koe123 wrote: post #18

Honestly I reach for podman or `nix develop` any chance I get. What is the edge that docker provides these days?

How do you manage your containers in podman declaratively? I tried to substitute docker-compose with Podman and Quadlets on a test server the other day, but was shocked how badly described the overall concept is. Most materials I found glimpsed through ability to run it as root/user and how different that is in configuration, and repeated the same 4-6 commands mantra. Spent a few hours on it and just... failed to run…

This has also been my experience, I'm used to using compose everywhere. I like the declarative file - tried podman and I found the documentation around the concept so scarce and all related to running things as non-root instead of telling me how my docker-compose becomes podman-compose. Still using docker everywhere because of that. Docker swarm mode has also worked wonders as an evolution to my compose files.