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Docker Raises $23M

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Re: Docker Raises $23M

#181

Post by ggregoire »

There are at least 10 alternatives to Docker listed in those comments. I can't imagine what someone relatively new to containerisation think about it. Is this the equivalence to "JavaScript fatigue" in the DevOps world?

Anyway, happy Docker user here. It changed the way I develop and distribute Python applications. Took me like 2 hours to learn enough to be productive. I'm sure there are better alternatives but Docker just covers my needs, it's well documented and easy to get started, everybody knows it and every cloud platform supports it.

Re: Docker Raises $23M

#182

Post by mrkeen »

systemvoltage wrote: post #42
paxys wrote: post #27

Considering how entrenched Docker has been in global tech infrastructure for so many years, I automatically assumed that the company was worth billions already, but guess not. I wonder why they haven't been bought out by Microsoft or Google, if nothing else then just for the talent.

It is obvious. This is a common pattern: 1. Offer open-source 100% free product that's absolutely ground breaking, unlike anything else. 2. Get a shitload of users and free PR machine gets rolling. Network effects kick in. 3. Go to investors with your active user count in excess of millions. 4. Investors go bonkers and their eyes swell up with all the ways they can exploit these addicted-to-free user base. 5. Company…

> 5. Company has trouble monetizing the users. Users are pissed.

Are we pissed?

Docker hasn't started showing me ads or spewing MOTDs asking for donations.

I haven't run into limitations that would have me purchase an upgrade.

It hasn't been bought by a proprietary company that would make me start worrying about its licencing.

It's a solid workhorse that's been at all my previous jobs and will be at all my future jobs for the foreseeable future.

Most criticisms of it boil down to "there are other container technologies".

Re: Docker Raises $23M

#183

Post by evanelias »

systemvoltage wrote: post #172
evanelias wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their initial product was a platform-as-a-service (dotCloud), which wasn't free, aside from the early beta. Docker was essentially a pivot. I see no evidence that the company was founded as a nefarious scheme to get users addicted to a free product.

You just made my point. The reason why I’ve never heard of dotCloud and literally everyone knows Docker. Docker is popular because it’s free. A lot of people would be upset if they take down their free hosting repositories. As a user, I want to pay for stuff to sustain companies. They can still be open source.

If enough users had wanted to pay for dotCloud, they wouldn't have needed to pivot in the first place.

My understanding (as a complete outsider) is that they raised a $10+ million series A for their PaaS. The PaaS then presumably wasn't successful enough to raise a subsequent round, but one of their technologies (Docker) was, despite the monetization path for it not being clear yet. So they pivoted to focus on that.

I'm not sure what other outcome could plausibly happen in this scenario. If they stuck with the PaaS as their main focus, they would have gone out of business many years ago.

Re: Docker Raises $23M

#184

Post by p_l »

KronisLV wrote: post #116
LeSaucy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was there ever a technical reason why swarm never won out in the market? I've still got a couple of multi-node swarms that work great and are WAY easier to configure than k8s. I never really understood why it didn't take off.

I'd also like to know more about this, since for smaller to medium sized deployments (think 1-100 nodes, maybe running between 1-1000 containers) Docker Swarm does seem like a pretty reasonable solution, especially with tools like Portainer ( https://www.portainer.io/ ) for a web based UI to manage it. I guess some of the reasons for the popularity of Kubernetes could be: - Kubernetes had Google as a big name behind…

I think people really undervalue the base design of k8s that is responsible for the existence of CRDs and other related pluggability (even before TPR became CRDs).

Pretty much every other option was more closed and with no extensibility, plus docker swarm was plagued (at least from my PoV) with stories of instability... and I dunno about others, but I and various people I talked with were burned with running docker in production, something that k8s nicely repackaged removing a lot of the things that were problematic.

All this went into giving some serious base beyond marketing and PR - the closest I've seen from other players is classic Rancher and Nomad, and especially the latter seems much less capable.

Re: Docker Raises $23M

#185

Post by johannes1234321 »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #132
systemvoltage wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is obvious. This is a common pattern: 1. Offer open-source 100% free product that's absolutely ground breaking, unlike anything else. 2. Get a shitload of users and free PR machine gets rolling. Network effects kick in. 3. Go to investors with your active user count in excess of millions. 4. Investors go bonkers and their eyes swell up with all the ways they can exploit these addicted-to-free user base. 5. Company…

> absolutely ground breaking, unlike anything else Containers existed for decades as a concept and for years on Linux (using lxc or VirtSquare and later nspawn)

It is true that the technologies existed for a while. I played with (Free)BSD jails and Solaris Zones long before Docker. Docker however made things "trivial" with the integration from container building, to public registry and docker-compose, which can make developer lives (depending on domain) much nicer. With jails and zones it was never as convenient.

Re: Docker Raises $23M

#186

Post by mrkeen »

mvzvm wrote: post #173
systemvoltage wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry if it came across this way. The snarky comment highlights pretty well that we magically expect almost without a second thought that GitHub is free. Support SourceHut and pay for hosting git if people want to break away from ostensibly free services. Or pay for Github. SourceHut is also open source.

In what way is Github not free?

Apologies in advance for the snark:

https://github.com/pricing

Re: Docker Raises $23M

#187

Post by tyingq »

zapita wrote: post #36
tyingq wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also, though, things like K8S not using Docker, podman becoming popular, etc. Neither is a definitive nail, but it does erode Docker's moat a bit.

K8S uses containerd which is the official Docker runtime.

"official Docker runtime"

Yes, though not produced by Docker and does not require Docker.

Re: Docker Raises $23M

#188

Post by stingraycharles »

cletus wrote: post #164
qeternity wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I am normally critical of the unicorn pizza-kitchen-on-wheels type of excess, I think this is only true in hindsight and has a lot to do with Docker lacking a commercially minded founder. Open source isn’t a business model. There are very synergistic business models that go hand in hand with OSS but that distinction is important. Github does not really have a defensible moat. I think the network effects there a…

Github is a good comparison here because obviously anyone can run a Git server but Github did create a lot of value adds and the UI helped build a network effect for the ease os use, cloning, PRs and so on. What's more, Github became the engine for dependency management. Go springs to mind here. I actually thought this was a terrible system (eg putting repo owner names in import strings) but it speaks to ubiquity of…

> I'm really not sure what Docker could've done differently here.

I think they should have realized orchestration was “the” thing for production much sooner. It’s not like you can’t integrate with cloud vendors on your own; there are plenty of managed service providers where you can get hybrid cloud solutions, Docker could have bet big on this.

Instead they came with swarm, which was focused too much on self-managed “on-prem”, while people really wanted something more complex, managed and with a healthy ecosystem of service providers.

Docker got stuck with being a software vendor, but they should have pivoted to being a service provider much, much sooner.

Re: Docker Raises $23M

#189

Post by 411111111111111 »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #176
caymanjim wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kubernetes is so much more than most people should want or need. It's far too complicated and heavyweight for smaller or simpler deployments. In AWS, most people should use ECS/Fargate instead. There are other competing container environments as well. Your point still stands; Docker popularized containerization and are in danger of becoming irrelevant because they ceded the container execution environment to others.

I beg to differ. The jump from learning Docker (and containers generally) to learning Kubernetes is not “hard”. Sure it’s a different paradigm of application deployment but I’ve seen far too many posts on HN that completely undermine its value in the name of difficulty. You can use it if you’re not “at scale” completely fine and reap all the benefits as if you were. Idk it’s because people hate Google, so they hate K…

Using k8s to deploy is easy, setting up a cluster with the 'new' admin command is also straightforward...

Doing maintenance on the cluster isn't. Debugging routing issues with it isn't either, configuring a production worthy routing to begin with isn't easy either. it's only quick if you deploy weave-net and call it a day.

I would strongly discourage anyone using k8s in production unless it's hosted or you have a full team whose only responsibility is it's maintenance, provisioning and configuration

Re: Docker Raises $23M

#190

Post by f430 »

filleokus wrote: post #76

It feels like Docker (Inc) is becoming less and less "relevant" for each year that passes. At least from my perspective, they led the popularisation of containerisation and the whole cattle-not-pets approach of deploying apps. They created big and long lasting change in the industry. But they seem to have lost the production environment race to Kubernetes, at least for now. They are the biggest player in the dev-mach…

> Anyways, I hope Docker find some viable business model, it would be sad to see them fail commercially after arguably succeeding in changing the (devops) world.

It if had a sustainable business model it would be deploying it now.

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