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Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years

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Re: Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a product that has zero reduction in functionality if your license or trial runs out, just constantly nags you when you do useful things with it. Eventually, the workers at the company insist on the company buying it. Sometimes takes 6 months hah.

"Nagware"

Accurate.

Re: Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years

#142
post #130
post #8

I remember everyone had written Docker off for dead when they announced their updated pricing plans, but they really made perfect sense, and I am happy to see the company recover. A large chunk of the tech world today relies on their products, but they were making next to nothing for it. It is definitely worth it for large companies to throw a few dollars their way considering the massive amount of value they are get…

I suspect the initial negative take on the license change was correct, and this is the dying gasp of the company. It's just taking longer than expected to replace Docker Desktop. But I am seeing a lot of progress on Podman and Rancher and a few others, and some of the larger tech companies are also building in-house replacements. A lot of the people who had to scramble to find a replacement are not happy about it. In…

What gets me about this is the math doesn't make any sense.

Docker charges $10/developer/month. Those developers are paid $150k+/yr, fully loaded to the company (insurance, taxes, accounting, etc) is probably double that, but call it $250k/yr to be nice. You take 3 developers and have them spend a quarter on replacing Docker Desktop, that's nearly $200k in developer costs spent replacing a tool that's gonna cost your 250 person company $30k/year.

Docker wants you to pay $10/mo to make your $20k/mo developer more effective, and companies in our industry would rather spend several months of developer time building an alternative that they'll have to support forever and teach every new individual coming into the company how to use.

For a group that seems to pride itself on math and logic and whatever, I don't understand what the hell we're thinking most of the time.

Re: Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years

#143
I work at a pretty large corporation that uses docker desktop. The engineering team is in the low hundreds spread across the world. We happily pay for what we use and it's all great. We don't really use many features of docker desktop though. We have our own image space (ecr) and I don't think anyone is using or relying on extensions. I'm sure some team will eventually socialize an alternative. The reason we went through with paying for docker desktop was probably the lost time and productivity of transitioning off without due diligence dedicated on getting another option to work just as well. I don't know if our org gets customized pricing, but if it's $24/mo for us, that's maybe a 1/3 of an hour of the least expensive run rate engineer we have (worldwide, again), per month. That's maybe 5 hours of run rate time per year per engineer. I can see why our org bought in at the time and continues.

On a personal note, I was fine with the change, since it allowed personal use still with docker desktop. When Docker Desktop for Linux came out, I gave it a try on a clean server. Unfortunately, even on a fresh Ubuntu install with fresh hardware, the reliability of Docker Desktop for Ubuntu was awful, crashing every few days into a stalled state. I had to make a cron job to watch it and maintain it's uptime.

Re: Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years

#144
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competitive Docker Desktop replacements (podman) are just starting to see adoption IMO. Let's see the number next year. Lots of companies had no other choice but to pay.

Maybe i'm just in a bubble but none of those Docker Desktop replacements work well on a locked down corporate laptop. Sure you can get it to work somehow, manually configuring proxies, dns and stuff. Docker Desktop somehow just works. Thats why we pay for it.

Life is too short to spend a third of your active life left on a locked down corporate laptop. You should be admin.

Re: Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years

#145
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the initial negative take on the license change was correct, and this is the dying gasp of the company. It's just taking longer than expected to replace Docker Desktop. But I am seeing a lot of progress on Podman and Rancher and a few others, and some of the larger tech companies are also building in-house replacements. A lot of the people who had to scramble to find a replacement are not happy about it. In…

What gets me about this is the math doesn't make any sense. Docker charges $10/developer/month. Those developers are paid $150k+/yr, fully loaded to the company (insurance, taxes, accounting, etc) is probably double that, but call it $250k/yr to be nice. You take 3 developers and have them spend a quarter on replacing Docker Desktop, that's nearly $200k in developer costs spent replacing a tool that's gonna cost your…

If you do the same math for a company with thousands, or tens of thousands, of developers, the answer looks different.

Large companies already have dedicated teams for stuff that is a lot less critical than the container runtime.

The companies that are too big to avoid paying, but too small to build a replacement, are the ones that are in a jam -- for now. But in a year or two, Podman or Rancher might might fully meet their needs. What should they do then? Continue to pay for Docker, or use a free and open source alternative that has feature parity?

Re: Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...because GitLab also has a convenient container registry Also Google Cloud, Amazon, Azure, and even DigitalOcean.

Ok. Docker is also a convenient container registry. And its independent of ALL of those infrastructures so if i cancel any of them or move elsewhere, Im still good. So why should I not pay for Docker?

> independent of ALL of those infrastructures

I want the container registry a local hop away from the thing using the images, not across the public internet…

Re: Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This works incredibly well on me. I often use free or open source versions of tools and just ignore the nagging prompts about licenses. Then over time, if I like it enough that I eventually end up getting a license for it. I think the ability for me to see the value in something first before committing helps a lot. The free version sort of builds a reservoir of good will that eventually pushes me over to just paying…

Agreed. The friction i have towards buying things i like is very low. As an Apple user i mistakenly convince myself that paying helps get better products[1], and so i don't mind buying products i like. However i have a ton of friction buying products when i don't know that they'll solve my problem. I judge them harshly on that first-buy. [1]: A semi humorous jab at Apple.

And while easy to cancel subscriptions theoretically let you try and get out, the reality is often that something else comes up, maybe you'll try it next month, you're still not sure, you forget about it, and before you know it you've paid quite a bit.

Re: Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years

#148

I'm surprised Docker Desktop drives so much revenue. As far as I know, it is a Mac and Windows-specific tool. Are FAANG and FAANG-like developers not using Linux machines locally despite deploying production software on Linux servers? Even for enterprise developers who use Mac and Windows, isn't 99% of day-to-day development on a Linux box you SSH into anyways? I've never really quite grasped the need for Docker Desk…

Some acquisitions at FAANG I’m at have carve outs with legal and finance for docker desktop. Originally internal projects are all on internal tooling for compliance reasons

Re: Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that I have to install on MacOS so that I can run docker. Is there any other way(i.e no gui utility) ?

Linux I just install some stuff from apt, so I assume you can brew install something to run it command line (no GUI)

Docker uses container functionality specific to the Linux kernel. So on Linux, you can install a relatively lightweight engine. But on MacOS or Windows, you need to install the entire "Docker Desktop" app, which secretly spins up a Linux VM in the background, and presents a (pretty poor) abstraction as if this is all running on the host machine.

Re: Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years

#150
post #92
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your question is confusing, docker-desktop is a gui utility. rancher-desktop is the equivalent to that. if you don't want a command line, docker itself (the underlying utility that the docker-desktop GUI drives) is free, in contrast to the GUI portion. Or kubernetes. so the direct answer is "brew install docker".

Nope, none of this is correct. Docker only runs on Linux. The core purpose of Docker Desktop (and similar tools) is to spin up a Linux VM under the hood and manage its lifecycle, route network calls, share volumes etc. You can do all of this yourself of course, but it will be a non-trivial amount of effort to set it up. "brew install docker" is just another way to install Docker Desktop. It does not run Docker native…

similarly, `brew install podman` will install something a lot like Docker Desktop
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