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What has Docker become?

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Re: What has Docker become?

#231

Post by shykes »

daveisfera wrote: post #226
shykes wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery! Obviously there was demand for an alternative to Docker that was native to the Red Hat platform. We couldn't offer that (although we tried in the early days) so it made sense that they would. In the early days we tried very hard to accommodate their needs, for example by implementing support for devicemapper as an alternative to aufs. I remember spending many hours in their…

There was probably a lot going on behind closed doors, but from the outside, it appeared that RedHat was trying to improve the security and technical details of containers, but Docker was just refusing pull requests and not playing nice. This eventually drove RedHat to make their own implementation (i.e. Podman), so it was a self created enemy and not necessarily one that was built-in/inevitable. I'm definitely not a…

I am painfully aware of that narrative. All I can say is that it is a false narrative, deliberately pushed by Red Hat for competitive reasons. There was a deliberate decision to spend marketing dollars making Docker look bad (specifically less secure), at a time where we were competing directly in the datacenter market.

Ask yourself: how many open source projects reject PRs every day because of design disagreements? That's just how open source works. Why did you hear about that specific case of PRs getting rejected, and why do you associate it with vague concepts like "arrogance" and "insecurity"? That's because a marketing team engineered a narrative, then spent money to deploy that narrative - via blog posts, social media posts, talks at conferences, analyst briefings, partner briefings, sales pitches, and so on. This investment was justified by the business imperative of countering what was perceived to be an existential threat to Red Hat's core business.

It opened my eyes to the reality of big business in tech: many of the "vibes" and beliefs held by the software engineering community, are engineered by marketing. If you have enough money to spend, you can get software engineers to believe almost anything. It is a depressing realization that I am still grappling with.

The most damning example I can give you: we once rejected a PR because it broke compatibility with other platforms. Red Hat went ahead and merged it in their downstream RPM package. So, Fedora and RHEL users who thought they were installing Docker, were in fact installing an unauthorized modified version of it. Later, a security vulnerability was discovered in their modified version only, but advertised as a vulnerability in Docker - imagine our confusion, looking for a vulnerability in code that we had not shipped. Then Red Hat used this specific vulnerability, which only existed in their modified version, in their marketing material attacking Docker as "insecure". That was an eye-opening moment for me...

Re: What has Docker become?

#232

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

chuckadams wrote: post #37
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #26

I 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.

Nix is wonderful for reproducible and declarative infrastructure, but how do you manage multiple server instances with it? I have a handful of projects active at any time, and am currently running four web servers, three mysql instances, two postgres, and a partridge in a pear tree. Should I run Nix in Docker, Docker from Nix, or is there a nix-only solution for this?

I couldn't speak to separate physical machines, but I run several "servers" as part of my dev environment.

You'd have to ensure that their ports and data directories don't collide, but I don't think you'll have a problem having "process-compose up" start multiple separate mysql, postgres, or webserver instances.

I just dedicate a terminal pane to it so I can arrow around and see the logs and health status of my databases (plus things like Prometheus and Grafana, I like to be able to nuke the cluster and have everything flatline, rather than having telemetry itself die when k8s goes away).

Both mysql and postgres are included in https://github.com/juspay/services-flake which you might find interesting.

Re: What has Docker become?

#233

Post by cpuguy83 »

oblio wrote: post #219
cpuguy83 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, and Docker sold such products and from early on.

Re: What has Docker become?

#234

Post by ffsm8 »

mg794613 wrote: post #45

"The problem is that Docker the technology became so successful that Docker the company struggled to monetize it. When your core product becomes commoditized and open source, you need to find new ways to add value." No, everything was already open source, other had done it before too, they just made it in a way a lot of "normal" users could start with it, then they waited too long and others created better/their own…

>> Docker Swarm was Docker’s attempt to compete with Kubernetes in the orchestration space."

> No, it never was intended like that.

It was certainly marketed as that though...

Re: What has Docker become?

#235

Post by whinvik »

mfro wrote: post #43
whinvik wrote: post #13

Sorry off topic question but has Docker come up with a easy to use dev solution. I always end up with using Devcontainer: it solves the sandboxed, ready to use dev env. But the actual experience with developing on VSCode with Dev Containers is not great. It's laggy and slow.

Devcontainers are great for me on windows and macos. What stack are you using?

I am on a Mac but I develop remotely on a VM, LSP is sometimes so slow, I want to shut it down.

Re: What has Docker become?

#237

Post by saghm »

Someone wrote: post #124
Moto7451 wrote: post #36

One thing that really hurt them from my PoV was how they acted when they changed their licensing structure with respect to revenue generating companies. I’m fine with the idea that licensing Docker and Docker Desktop is a good thing to do. However, I think they just made people distrust their motives with their approached to this. At two places I worked their reps reached out to essentially ensnare the company in a s…

> if we were running the version of Docker Desktop after the commercial licensing requirement change, they sent a 30 day notice to license the product or they’d sue. What exactly are you objecting to? Since you say “I’m fine with the idea that licensing Docker and Docker Desktop is a good thing to do” it’s not the change, so what is it? The 30 days, them saying they would sue after that, or the tone? I haven’t seen t…

Normally people who want to sell something don't start out right off the bat with the threat of a lawsuit

Re: What has Docker become?

#238

Post by JCattheATM »

amluto wrote: post #87
radioradioradio wrote: post #82

Seems like (according to the author) whatever docker is doing it is a sign of their immediate demise and everyone on HN is cheering for the company to go down in flames no matter what. The tech is open source and free forever - thats somehow a problem? The company monitised enterprise features, while keeping core and hub free - also a problem? Is exploring AI tools, like everyone else is? should they not? should they…

> Docker is still maintaining the runtime on which orbstack, podman Podman? Podman appears to have reimplemented basically everything. What runtime are you talking about?

Hub.

Re: What has Docker become?

#239

Post by cpuguy83 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #156
cpuguy83 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, we didn't do much around it. Small startup with monetization problems and all.

So absolutely at least some of that is true. I’d be surprised if the systemd thing was not also true. I think it’s quite likely Docker did not have a good handle on the “needs” of the enterprise space. That is Red Hats bread and butter; are you saying they developed all of that for no reason?

I made no comment about RedHat's offerings.

I don't feel like RedHat had to do anything to sell support contracts in this case, because that was already their business. All they had to do was say they'll include container support as part of their contracts.

What they did do, AIUI based on feedback in the oss docker repos, is those contracts stipulated that you must run RHEL in the container and the host, and use systemd in the container in order to be "in support". So that's kind of a self-feeding thing.

Re: What has Docker become?

#240

Post by scoodah »

Alupis wrote: post #198
bmitch3020 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I hate about docker and other such solutions is that I cannot install it as nonroot user There's a rootless [0] option, but that does require some sysadmin setup on the host to make it possible. That's a Linux kernel limitation on all container tooling, not a limitation of Docker. > and that it keeps images between users in a database. Not a traditional database, but content addressable filesystem layers, comm…

If I install podman on my Linux machine, it's rootless by default. No fiddling required of me. Docker could do a lot better job in the packaging of their software. Even major updates require manual uninstalling and reinstalling it... Podman just works.

While true, what the grandparent comment mentions still applies to podman:

> I cannot install it as nonroot user

You still need root privileges to install podman initially.

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