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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

#151

Post by kdrag0n »

Looks like there's a lot of discussion about Docker Desktop alternatives here, so shameless plug: I've been working on a new Linux+Docker+Kubernetes solution for macOS recently! Already has quite a few improvements over existing apps including Docker Desktop, Rancher, Colima, etc:

- Fast networking: 30 Gbps! vs. 150 Mbps with Docker VPNKit. Full VPN compatibility, IPv6, ping, ICMP and UDP traceroute, and half-open TCP connections. (Future work: transparent proxies)

- Bidirectional filesystem sharing: fast VirtioFS to access macOS from Linux, but there's also access to the Linux filesystem from macOS. This can help with performance: for example, you could store code in Linux and edit it from macOS with VS Code (which can take the performance hit of sharing), so the container runs with native FS speed.

- Not limited to Docker or Kubernetes. You can run multiple full Linux distros as system containers (like WSL) so they share resources.

- Fast x86 emulation with Rosetta

- Bidirectional CLI integration like WSL

- Much lower background CPU usage. Only ~0.05% CPU usage and 2-5 idle wakeups per second — less than most apps, while Docker wakes up ~120 times per second. Made possible with low-level kernel optimizations. Also, no Electron!

- Better solutions to other problems that can occur on macOS: clock drift is corrected monotonically, dynamic disk size, and more I'm working on now. Will look into memory usage too, although I can't guarantee a good fix for that.

- No root needed

Planning to release it as a paid app later this month. Not OSS, but I think the value proposition is pretty good and there will be a free trial. Not sure about pricing yet. (Let me know if you have any thoughts on this!)

If anyone is interested, drop me an email (see bio) and I'll let you know when this is ready for testing, likely within a week or two at most :)

Also, feel free to ask questions here or let me know if there are other warts you'd like to see fixed.

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

#152

Post by babelfish »

kdrag0n wrote: post #151

Looks like there's a lot of discussion about Docker Desktop alternatives here, so shameless plug: I've been working on a new Linux+Docker+Kubernetes solution for macOS recently! Already has quite a few improvements over existing apps including Docker Desktop, Rancher, Colima, etc: - Fast networking: 30 Gbps! vs. 150 Mbps with Docker VPNKit. Full VPN compatibility, IPv6, ping, ICMP and UDP traceroute, and half-open TC…

How do you achieve 30Gbps?

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

#153

Post by arcturus17 »

AeroNotix wrote: post #37
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it's also good to pay in order to support the company, so long as they continue to provide something of value.

This is terrible financial advice.

Some companies are probably not far away from technical collapse if a few of their critical open source libraries and tooling go to shit. Better cough up a little bit now than have to fork in the future and set up a whole new team to maintain that dependency - likely with much worse results than before.

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

#154

Post by roughly »

twblalock wrote: post #145
roughly wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mee…

Ok, I'll do the math:

$250k/yr/developer, so for 1 quarter, that's $62.5k, 3 developers for one quarter is $187.5k. Docker costs $10/mo, or $120/yr, so for 1000 developers, that's $120k/yr, or a payoff time of 1.5 years, assuming nobody ever has to touch anything ever again. Let's say our solution requires 1 developer-quarter per year to maintain - bugfixes, upgrades, deployments, etc. That's $62.5k/yr. That pushes our payoff time out to 2.5 years.

Let's say our solution causes a net decrease in developer productivity of 1% (our solution has a bug that means things are slow for a day, developers can't google for easy answers, developers have to port things into our system) - that's a minute of extra work for every ~2hrs. That's 1000*250k*.01, or a net drain to the company of $2.5M/yr, which effectively pushes our payback time out to "never".

Hell, we can even work the math the other way - for replacing Docker Desktop to be worthwhile, it's gotta cost less than $120/yr/developer. Developers cost $250k/yr, for call it 250 days of work per year, so $1000/day, or $125/hr, which means if the aggregate cost of our replacement to an individual user is even an hour per year, it wouldn't be worth doing for free. Add in the cost of actually having someone actually maintain our replacement product, and the math's even shittier.

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

#155

Post by ghaff »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #135
jbverschoor wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is that devs that get paid 200k+ complain about getting any software license

Bad take. It's a tool needed for the business that the business is expected to pay for. The license belongs to the company not the employee.

In principle, I agree with you. In practice, if there are cheap tools (or, more likely often less cheap services) to fulfill business requirements--and make things including things like traveling more pleasant--I'll often just pay out rather than dealing with approvals and requests which are often out of policy.

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

#156

Post by tester457 »

roughly wrote: post #142
_skel wrote: 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…

> 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.

Organizations are prone to bike shedding and forget about opportunity cost.

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

#157

Post by [deleted] »

roughly wrote: post #142
_skel wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#158

Post by keewee7 »

roughly wrote: post #142
_skel wrote: 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…

This article from 2013 might give an indication on why some people choose FOSS even when they can afford the non-FOSS solutions:

  The licensing. My God, the licensing. It's not so much the money, as the infernal, mind-bending tax code level complexity involved in making sure all your software is properly licensed: determining what 'level' and 'edition' you are licensed at, who is licensed to use what, which servers are licensed... wait, what? Sorry, I passed out there for a minute when I was attacked by rabid licensing weasels.

  I'm not inclined to make grand pronouncements about the future of software, but if anything kills off commercial software, let me tell you, it won't be open source software. They needn't bother. Commercial software will gleefully strangle itself to death on its own licensing terms.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/

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

#159

Post by mbreese »

tester457 wrote: post #156
roughly wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Organizations are prone to bike shedding and forget about opportunity cost.

And people (including developers) aren’t always rational actors that act logically. Rightly or wrongly, there is a sense of fairness at play when something that was once free is no longer free. People aren’t entitled to a free lunch, but once you have it, it’s hard to take it away. Things like this can make even the most logical people act counterintuitively.

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

#160

Post by vasco »

roughly wrote: post #154
twblalock wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mee…

Ok, I'll do the math: $250k/yr/developer, so for 1 quarter, that's $62.5k, 3 developers for one quarter is $187.5k. Docker costs $10/mo, or $120/yr, so for 1000 developers, that's $120k/yr, or a payoff time of 1.5 years, assuming nobody ever has to touch anything ever again. Let's say our solution requires 1 developer-quarter per year to maintain - bugfixes, upgrades, deployments, etc. That's $62.5k/yr. That pushes o…

A big mistake with this math is that globally developers are not paid anywhere close to 250k/yr even fully loaded for the company. In my country in Europe it's closer to 60k/yr fully loaded. There is cheaper. Also most companies aren't gonna build something from scratch, they are going to use something else that is also available. That being said this type of exercise is good to show because many managers do not do it.
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