It's a good thing that the commons are cheap. Imagine where we would be if all electrical devices were still covered by patents related to electricity, all owned by one company.
What has Docker become?
211–220 of 286 posts
Re: What has Docker become?
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like its a hole in the market if new services are cropping up. If there wasn't a hole then established clouds would have this. I don't have to think if I want a virtual machine booted with Ubuntu. I can do that in any cloud. How many have vibe coding support to launch containers that work locally in a cloud so they are accessible as a website? How many of those have a build process that does security checks and…
Those seems like such basic and tablestake features of such a platform, that I've assumed they all do something like that already. Is that not the case? Is it vibecoders who aren't programmers who are building these services or what's going on?
Yes, vibe coders are telling prompts to build web apps in IDEs like Windsurf/Antigravity, and it sets up the local environment, but getting that from local to web is still a pain point. It's a hole in the market with potential for a firm like Docker that needs to monetize without upsetting its community. Remember, vibe coders are more enthusiasts than professionals. Check out /r/vibecoding on Reddit for an idea of the general market that would use something like this.
Re: What has Docker become?
#213It's a config DSL for a config DSL (OS files). Docker isn't much different from an AI wrapper. What was this mighty corporate machine supposed to become shipping config scripts?
The team I was before Docker got popular just used the OG container, user accounts, and set up namespaces and cgroups per user.
Docker represents perfectly the issue with the software industry; it is software that duplicates existing software chasing "line go up" not actual utility. No net new utility just different semantics to perform sys admin work.
Developers did not want to learn sys admin, and instead learned a meta-Docker-driven-sysadmin anyway.
Re: What has Docker become?
#214We use swarm in production and love it. K8s is extreme overkill for a high percentage of most of the shops who are using it, in my estimation.
Re: What has Docker become?
#215I used to be very enthusiastic about docker compose, but I've been playing around with nix + process-compose lately and its pretty great. I can have k3s and tilt in there only when it's necessary--which it's usually not.
cool,, i have to check out process-compose.
It's pretty much just docker compose, but you don't have to forward ports or map volumes because the processes are not running in containers. The TUI is pretty nice also. If docker compose has an equivalent I'm not aware of it.
Its especially nice for use with agents because the process-compose commands can be used to understand what's running, what's pending, what's failing, etc. Of course there's always `ps aux | grep` but that's full of noise from the rest of your system and it doesn't provide and structure for understanding: "foo is not running because the readiness check for bar is failing".
Containers have their place, but I don't think it's everywhere.
Re: What has Docker become?
#216> Docker created a standard so successful that it became infrastructure, and infrastructure is hard to monetize Open infrastructure is hard to monetize. Old school robotics players have a playbook for this. You may or may not agree DBs are infra but Oracle has done well by capitalistic standards. The reality is in our economy exploitation is a basic requirement. Nothing says a company providing porcelain for Linux ke…
Imo the problem with SaaS products is that their revenue expectations are priced accordingly to the market they serve, not the money it takes recreating them. If I wrote the best word processor in the world, I could probably sell it for a decent sum to quite a few people. However if I expressed my revenue expectations as a percentage of revenue from the world's bestselling novels, I would be very quickly disappointed…
That's because in the US it's common to see pricing based on "value", rather than based on costs plus a reasonable profit margin. This is one big reason why US products don't have much success in the rest of the world unless they're truly irreplaceable like the hyperscalers. Most of the world considers value-pricing as basically immoral.
Re: What has Docker become?
#217> Docker created a standard so successful that it became infrastructure, and infrastructure is hard to monetize Open infrastructure is hard to monetize. Old school robotics players have a playbook for this. You may or may not agree DBs are infra but Oracle has done well by capitalistic standards. The reality is in our economy exploitation is a basic requirement. Nothing says a company providing porcelain for Linux ke…
The "Fair Source" [1] and "Fair Code" [2] licenses are sustainable and user-friendly. Imagine if Docker the company could charge AWS and Google for their use of their technology. Imagine if Redis, Elastic, and so many other technologies could. Modern database companies will typically dual license their work so they don't have their lunch eaten. I've done it for some of my own work [3]. You want your customers to have…
> Imagine if Docker the company could charge AWS and Google for their use of their technology.
The technology on which Docker is based, Linux containers, was developed by Google engineers for Borg, and later Docker adopted it when it pivoted away from LXC (an IBM technology).
Re: What has Docker become?
#218Hi, I'm the founder of Docker. I started it in 2008 (under the name Dotcloud) and left in 2018. AMA.
Hi! Thanks for offering an AMA here. I don't have a specific question, but I am interested in hearing about the general story of what it was like developing Docker, what the experience was like trying to build a business around it, and what you're up to these days in post-Docker life. Thanks in advance!
It's difficult to tell the whole story in a HN comment, but if you're interested, I did share my experience in a few podcasts over the years. Here are a few that I could find on youtuve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVED44sb7zg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSlHvz57RKs
I also recently discovered a trove of my old presentations, retracing my early obsession with the same problem, and my repeated failed attempts to get people to care. I shared some of them in a talk a few weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huRfsLMK5sA
Re: What has Docker become?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
It didn't help them that they rejected the traditionally successful ways of monetizing open source software. Which is, selling support contracts to large corporate users. Corporate customers didn't like the security implications of the Docker daemon running as root, they wanted better sandboxing and management (cgroups v2), wanted to be able to run their own internal registries, didn't want to have docker trying to f…
Absolutely none of this is true. Docker had support contracts (Docker EE... and trying to remember, docker-cs before that naming pivot?). Corporate customers do not care about any of the things you mentioned. I mean, maybe some, but in general no. That's not what corps think about. There was never "no interest" at Docker in cgv2 or rootless. Never. cgv2 early on was not useable. It lacked so much functionality that v…
I've worked in build/release engineering/devops for a long time.
I would be utterly shocked if corporate customers wouldn't want corporate Docker proxies/caches/mirrors.
Entire companies have been built on language specific artifact repositories. Generic ones like Docker are even more sought after.
Re: What has Docker become?
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not the 90s anymore.
It that comment says is “I don’t know what docker solves”
it's a parody of the infamous https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224