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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

#221

Post by [deleted] »

dijit wrote: post #215
HatchedLake721 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. This is why I don’t want to sell to developers. “Here’s a solution that will save you hours every month, it’s only $9 p/m.” “$9 p/m???” - asked a developer choking on their avocado toast “That’s the same price as Spotify! Meh, I can develop the same thing myself in 2 weeks.” 2 months later. "Well, it's almost done. At least I won't be wasting $9 p/m."

Its not devs buying these tools in a company context, and devs are not on universally high salaries. I made the point before that these little costs rack up quickly, I can speak to my costs: Gitlab: 19/m Docker: 24/m Slack: 12.5/m Copilot: 19/m Office: 12.5/m Tailscale: 15/m oslash: 6/mo pagerduty: 41/m Jira/Confluence: 26.25/m Calendly: 16/m Bonusly: 4.5/m Snyk: 98/m Figma: 42/m Lens: 20/m Postman: 29/m Sourcegraph:…

[deleted]

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

#222

Post by ivalm »

ahepp wrote: post #179
roughly wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Assume 250k/employee ctc that’s $250M. Assume revenue is 2x labor cost and that’s 500M earnings. Typical revenue multiple nowadays is like 5, unless very high growth, so $2.5B valuation. Not exactly big but unicorn at least.

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

#223

Post by [deleted] »

jchw wrote: post #199
selfmodruntime wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Docker Desktop is a godsend. I live most of my developing life in my terminal, but the ability to glance into what's going on in different services along with mounts, environment variables and logging is invaluable.

I honestly can't relate very much. I can understand how it would help to be able to see the full breadth of what information there is to go along with containers, but A. I find Docker Desktop to be kind of annoying B. I actually feel like the CLI tool is well organized enough that it is not a problem to quickly grok what information I need using easy-to-remember commands. That said, Podman Desktop[1] does most of thi…

[deleted]

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

#224

Post by pas »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #196
jchw wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The problem here is simple; it only provides this immense value if it is effectively free without discrimination. But of course, it can't really just be free, or at least Dockerhub certainly can't be. This is a self inflicted wound. They placed themselves there but never though about the costs of running a free service with PBs of traffic. > On the other hand, it also provides immense value to enterprise and even s…

would enterprizes have paid for dockerhub from day1? it's very unlikely.

also they are in a tough spot, because if they limit the download of the most popular images, they limit their own basic usability, and those images happen to be almost all free super-fungible stuff (alpine, ubuntu, node, redis, postgresql, nginx, apache, and all the hundreds and thousands of common stuff FOSS stuff)

tying downloads to clients requires some development, requires setting up rate-limiting, etc.

I think what they ended up doing is not a terrible outcome (require login above a certain number of pulls, plus - I imagine - they require login if an IP address pulls too much anyway), but they can't really charge too much, because setting up a caching proxy is kind of trivial.

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

#225

Post by skissane »

dathinab wrote: post #204
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…

I think you are overestimating how much most developers world wide are payed. Something like $150k+/yr might be something you can get in silicon valley but outside of the US this level of payment is reserved to a small number of senior developer. Through that doesn't really change your arguments point. Through I also would argue that while some companies are tightly coupled to docker desktop many others are not (and…

> If you only need containers (e.g. docker cli) but not docker desktop podman is already a drop in replacement in many case, one which in certain aspects is even much better to boost(*1).

> (1): Through that is only on Linux

If you only need Docker CLI on Linux, the open source version of Docker works fine, so you don’t need any alternative to the proprietary licensed Docker

The problem I saw firsthand in moving off Docker Desktop for Mac, is (last I checked) nothing else had as seamless networking and filesystem integration on Mac as Docker Desktop does. Funnily enough the Docker Desktop networking stuff is open source (VPNKit), but at the time nobody else seemed to have integrated it with the open source bits of Docker in a way which just worked.

With Docker Desktop for Mac, our Gradle scripts which created Docker containers on the Linux CI infrastructure worked unchanged on macOS. We tried moving to minikube or podman and with both we lost that

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

#226

Post by okanat »

enumjorge wrote: post #217
ilyt wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a myth that software developers are good with computers but that's mostly not the case, hence heavy mac/windows usage, harder to break than someone with linux machine and root. Also Ubuntu kinda breaks more for normal users.

You're forgetting the good developers who want to minimize the time spent dealing with issues or idiosyncrasies at the OS level.

I am one of the developers who maintain our embedded Linux distro. I use WSL2 to compile it. I used Linux desktops for 15 years as my primary desktop previously and I will never go back to Linux desktop. I spend less to no time on Windows for configuring the HiDPI displays, finding hacks to make presentations and chat software work, dealing with dodgy drivers.

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

#227

Post by pas »

alooPotato wrote: post #90
hnarn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a strange argument. So if it hasn’t happened before it’s impossible?

You said "Juicing ARR in a dying company is not rocket science" - I'm saying it is rocket science and that it's way hard. The fact there aren't any examples makes me feel like I'm correct in saying it's not easy.

do we know the breakdown of that revenue? are companies paying for dockerhub access? is docker desktop a big chunk? how many users? how many companies?

if they can keep providing value to their high-revenue clients, sure, they might keep doing great, but if all they provide is a mediocre desktop app and the dockerhub these companies will eventually set up a caching proxy for the dockerhub (or otherwise trim down pulls), and will migrate to alternatives for the desktop app.

the hockey stick looks great though. and comparing it with Atlassian is really apt, because Jira is a bona fide UX garbage fire, but ... there are just no real alternatives. So folks continue to pay for it. It's madness, but there's a method to it, of course.

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

#228

Post by themoop »

Everyone talks about how docker desktop will be replaced as it's a commodity and I agree. However I see no one talking about the value Docker hub brings which is now bundled with all paid users.

By paying we didn't have to migrate anything and are now building and pushing every commit on our app as a 800mb image (I know its a little to big...). We are storing hundreds if not thousands of images and uploading / pulling TBs.

This kind of usage appears much pricier in container registry offered by cloud vendors

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

#229

Post by coredog64 »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #193
TeMPOraL wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At work, I developed step by step instructions for using Docker on WSL2, the normal CLI way. People liked it, but figured they liked the GUI better. They also argued that they may as well stick to the GUI because there was a team somewhere else in the company that really insisted they need Docker Desktop, so the company will be buying licenses anyway. (I was already working on those instructions when the pricing chan…

Docker (and podman for that matter) running on WSL2 need serious corporate investment in pairing with wsl-vpnkit or a similar hack, publishing in Software Center and maintaining. In hindsight, I would say, it costs several man-months of senior engineers' with good connections in various departments. And this comes on top of productivity losses prior to the solution.

Docker needs a corporate commitment to tracking who is using the product and maintaining those records for 12 months.

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

#230

Post by Karrot_Kream »

alexeldeib wrote: post #190
roughly wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Let's say our solution causes a net decrease in developer productivity of 1% This is an extremely aggressive assumption, and affects the entire equation. What happens when you achieve parity in 1 month, because actually, docker isn't that important? nerdctl + containerd basically eliminate my need for docker in a work context. nerdctl only for my local development. Tech companies with XX thousand employees already…

The marginal costs of dedicated infrastructure teams is the legion of tickets that product teams want fixed first. The signup team hates that signups take seconds to process instead of milliseconds so there's desire to rebuild the batch job runner, the identity teams want you to make a richer capability-based authz system so that they can sell capabilities as a customer facing product, etc. These infra teams need to justify rebuilding infra like Docker against the marginal opportunities of creating new things for product teams.
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