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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

#171

Post by fxtentacle »

paxys wrote: 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'm still wondering if this will be enough to pay back the 10x on $430 mio in funding that their investors expect...

$135 mio in revenue is great, but they need 4.3 billion in profits.

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

#172

Post by thih9 »

paxys wrote: 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…

> A large chunk of the tech world today relies on their products, but they were making next to nothing for it.

Isn’t this kind of monetization problem quite common for tech companies in general?

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

#173

Post by drstewart »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #136

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…

>not using Linux machines locally despite deploying production software on Linux servers?

no

>isn't 99% of day-to-day development on a Linux box you SSH into anyways?

no

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

#174

Post by ilyt »

jchw wrote: post #57
satvikpendem wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just goes to show how what enterprise customers value and what individual developers value are two very different things.

The problem I have with Docker is very simple; to individual users, they provide a service invaluable in a similar vein, though not of similar importance necessarily, to Wikipedia or Archive.org; Docker is literally a utility, which can enable tons of different interactions. The open source community is flooded with different ways to use Docker and take advantage of OCI images and whatnot. I just recently gave distro…

Counter-point: most of the value is "a repository of images" and that's just hard sell to pay massive extra (over just "a local VM with some code running" or some of the cloud offerings) for a essentially S3-like file storage with slightly different API and some structure.

Yeah tools and common container format is why it got popular but with amount of alternatives that's not monetizable either.

Docker desktop is a smart move honestly, monetize stuff around the containers (managing, making sure its secure) that generally requires a lot of knowledge without it, so the pitch is not just "make the job easier" but "maybe allow company to skip hiring person(s) dedicated to running the whole house of cards"

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

#175

Post by ilyt »

jbverschoor wrote: post #76
FlyingSnake wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised by this as well, but maybe it was the HN bias that made that impression. My company received the memo from Docker to upgrade to paid version, and I helped many to move on to Podman. However there were teams for which getting a Docker Desktop license was easier than the Podman move. I am sure there are many more companies that can easily afford the convenience of Docker Desktop for a trivial fee.

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

Licenses are PITA to deal with regardless of how much you're being paid.

Especially on servers, and especially if for some stupid reason licensed software need internet access to confirm it is licensed, coz that's extra crap that needs to be added on proxy or firewalls and will inevitably break when they change something.

If it's "hey, pay us X and we trust you don't cheat us" yeah, it's just extra invoice ,whatever.

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

#176

Post by ilyt »

speedgoose wrote: post #144
cabraca wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, the corporate is paying you for that time either way so that's their loss really

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

#177

Post by ilyt »

babelfish wrote: post #152
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?

I'm more interested how docker achieves 150Mbit, that's dog slow

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

#178

Post by tpmx »

user3939382 wrote: post #169

The second there's a CLI-only 100% compatible Docker Desktop replacement for macOS I'll use it. Docker Desktop on macOS is insanely slow and there's 0 reason it should be a GUI app that lives in my menubar, it's just ridiculous. So far all the alternatives are "mostly" compatible with caveats here and there.

Yeah. It also relatively often breaks and requires a purge. I need to do it approximately once per month.

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

#179

Post by ahepp »

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…

Is 1,000 employees a big tech company?

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

#180

Post by JeremyNT »

oceanplexian wrote: post #129
paxys wrote: 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…

> A large chunk of the tech world today relies on their products, but they were making next to nothing for it. Yes, but only because they ran a massive marketing campaign, and then achieved market penetration as a result of years of developer cargo-culting. Containers have been around years before Docker, docker added a ton of bloat and a repository. So what? None of the predecessors (Jails, OpenVZ, etc.) needed tens…

> Containers have been around years before Docker, docker added a ton of bloat and a repository. So what? None of the predecessors (Jails, OpenVZ, etc.) needed tens of millions of dollars. Docker just capitalized on something that was open source and shamelessly monetized it. Great for them but not really worthy of admiration or anything to be remotely impressed by.

I think it's worth noting that the only thing they make much money off of now is their desktop application.

They made it possible for clueless users to "run containers" on Windows and Mac OS (nevermind it's just a Linux VM...). Technical users had long been capable of doing similar themselves with Linux or BSD or Solaris or what have you, but that's not the important piece of what Docker brought to the table.

(And yes, many developers are "clueless users" when it comes to this sort of thing)

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