Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 597 posts

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#451

Post by SmellTheGlove »

version_five wrote: post #401
jdwithit wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This poster has clearly worked at the same kind of companies I have. Plenty of them would gladly burn 10x what it would cost to just buy the damn license on engineering man-hours switching something that's inferior but free. Because it doesn't show up as an expense on the annual budget. The concept of opportunity cost is completely lost on a lot of business leaders.

Exactly. I've never understood why capital or cash expense costs are valued so much differently than salary costs. I've had jobs (like any manager) where I have complete leeway on how I "spend" millions of dollars of people's time, but had to to through all kinds of approval to spend even the smallest amount of money.

There are a few reasons:

- Reviewing purchases should put some reasonable controls around how much software you can accumulate. Adding to the tech stack has maintenance costs, and you don't really want to do it without some sort of review. In this case, it's not the dollars as much as the fit.

- With SaaS tools in particular, there are often privacy or security concerns. Those teams should review. Probably want legal's eyes on it to get the right terms in place as well. Again, less about the dollars here, and more about the agreement, risk, required disclosures (subprocessor, etc), and those kinds of factors.

- On the spend itself, you'd be surprised how this adds up, especially if folks are signing multi-year deals and not bothering to negotiate licensing. Remember, if it's easy for you and me to buy, it's easy for everyone else to buy too, and it multiplies quickly.

Now, on one-off hardware purchases and such, I agree it should be a lot easier. At least at the startup I work at, anything under $500 is just an expense report, so just make sure your manager is cool with it and go for it. But there are considerations here also around stuff coming in that IT or facilities then needs to support - obligating their time with your purchase is something you need to agree on or avoid.

EDIT: Also as someone else pointed out, grift on purchase orders is easy without any oversight.

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#452

Post by nja »

glutamate wrote: post #48

If Docker wants to grow up, maybe they could start with replying to support tickets from paying customers. I have a 10 day old open ticket with no reply.

Hah, tell me about it. We were unable to give them more money (buy more seats), and our urgent support request was open for a week. Turns out (from a moment's console snooping) it was a straightforward REST call that was missing a body parameter, so a simple 'curl' fixed the issue for us. But I wonder... how long they were actively hurting their business? And how did a serious bug like that get into production? What does that say about their systems?

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#453

Post by MattGaiser »

jdwithit wrote: post #177
namdnay wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s assuming some kind soul in engineering management has the patience and leverage to guide this through 10 layers of purchasing, procurement, finance, legal etc… Another likely outcome is that it’s “easier” for teams to switch to another tool (easier in that at least they’re not waiting on a third party for approval) and everyone loses a lot of time Big corporations are not the most efficient beasts for this kin…

This poster has clearly worked at the same kind of companies I have. Plenty of them would gladly burn 10x what it would cost to just buy the damn license on engineering man-hours switching something that's inferior but free. Because it doesn't show up as an expense on the annual budget. The concept of opportunity cost is completely lost on a lot of business leaders.

> The concept of opportunity cost is completely lost on a lot of business leaders.

A lot of it is that opportunity cost really isn't the problem of many business units. I spent a week building a crappy version of codecov for our few repos.

Dev won't get in trouble for that because opportunity cost isn't a thing for us as a cost centre.

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#454

Post by smackeyacky »

I can see Microsoft or Amazon stepping into this space. If GitHub desktop is anything to go by, getting [MS][AWS]Container Desktop as a replacement for Docker desktop would be a no brainer. 90% of what Docker Desktop does is already available in VSCode in some form, just the janky GUI is missing.

Somebody else already did the hard work to get it going with WSL2, why not just cut out the 3rd party you don't need and put it together so the command lines were compatible and your existing tooling works. AWS and Microsoft both have skin in this game and Docker Desktop would be right in their sights.

On something like Debian, you don't even get a desktop gui and you don't miss it either. No reason why WSL2 or a mac shouldn't be exactly the same.

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#455

Post by Conan_Kudo »

dralley wrote: post #374
oplav wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use podman, but a quick search shows that you can install podman on Linux, Windows, and MacOS. Are you referring to something else? https://podman.io/getting-started/installation

If you read the instructions, they basically say that you still need a Linux VM or WSL environment to run Podman in. Which makes it not a complete replacement for Docker desktop, which handles the VM for you. So OP isn't wrong.

Podman 3.3 and up has `podman machine`, which is supposed to do this for you...

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#456

Post by stonecharioteer »

stusmall wrote: post #300
ben7799 wrote: post #147

We use Docker Desktop for the Mac at work. (Large company) Docker for Mac absolutely sucks. If they’re going to force everyone to pay they better start fixing bugs. They recently stopped allowing skipping a release unless you pay, and then promptly shipped a point release with a showstopper bug. I literally asked IT for a Linux VM/Cloud machine yesterday for development because my Mac is dead in the water due to a bu…

I recently switched jobs and made sure I wasn't going to get a mac again just because of Docker Desktop. At my last job, we had an application that did some very strange things with the Docker API. It regularly crash or lock up the VM or hit subtle correctness bugs in networking. I get the problem they are trying to solve is extremely difficult. I don't think I'd do much better trying to seamlessly ship a very Linux-…

I'm the only person at my company who asked for a Linux machine. And I got it. Everyone else is on an M1. I said no. I don't want to use a Mac ever again. I had a Mac for 2 years at my previous company, one of those 2018 monstrousities. Never again.

I asked for a P14 AMD Ryzen 7 5850H ThinkPad. Its still en route. But until then I'm using my Dell G5 SE Ryzen 7 4800H laptop with Manjaro. Best dev experience I've ever had at a company. The dev machine adds to the package IMO. If you're not getting the tools you want, you're not being paid enough ever.

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#457

Post by stonecharioteer »

throwawayy293 wrote: post #56

I personally support Docker Desktop for Mac for an organization of 250-300 engineers. I have been supporting it for 2 years now. Been through all the Docker Desktop upgrades, performance issues everytthing. I have researched docker performance on macs running k3d + k3s + istio and a bunch of microservices. I have had to jump into the internals of Docker daemon and docker cli and networking to solve how docker network…

I hope you do get the Linux Laptops through. I just joined s company that made an exception for me to use Linux and I haven't felt more valued ever. I never want to use another OS again.

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#458

Post by amazingman »

TheDong wrote: post #206
deusex_ wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what minikube backend are you using for this? The preferred one is Docker and all the others are also paid on Mac.

> all the others are also paid on Mac Hyperkit is open source software that works on macOS. https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/drivers/hyperkit/ Virtualbox is also a free (as in beer, and mostly libre) driver that works on all of windows/linux/macOS

I’m also using Hyperkit w/ minikube, and after some heavy setup automation it works pretty great. What I worry about, though, is what I’m going to do when I switch to a Mac w/ Apple Silicon. AFAICT Hyperkit is x64-only.

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#459

Post by Dylan16807 »

dralley wrote: post #374
oplav wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use podman, but a quick search shows that you can install podman on Linux, Windows, and MacOS. Are you referring to something else? https://podman.io/getting-started/installation

If you read the instructions, they basically say that you still need a Linux VM or WSL environment to run Podman in. Which makes it not a complete replacement for Docker desktop, which handles the VM for you. So OP isn't wrong.

So that's a couple hours for the first dev to make a list of WSL setup instructions or a VM template, and 5 minutes each for every dev after.

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#460

Post by wahern »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #215
namdnay wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s assuming some kind soul in engineering management has the patience and leverage to guide this through 10 layers of purchasing, procurement, finance, legal etc… Another likely outcome is that it’s “easier” for teams to switch to another tool (easier in that at least they’re not waiting on a third party for approval) and everyone loses a lot of time Big corporations are not the most efficient beasts for this kin…

I've been fortunate enough to work at companies where engineers were trusted to make small purchasing decisions. It works well for a while, but eventually everyone accumulates a lot of random recurring charges and the company cracks down. $21 is nothing for a one-time spend. $21 per month per employee is now $252/year per employee, but now you also need someone managing all of these licenses and accounting. Every new…

Someone making $250k/year shouldn't think twice dropping $21/month on a tool that truly makes them more productive.

A year or two ago I bought a personal license to Ubuntu FIPS after being urgently asked to debug an issue w/ Python's OpenSSL bindings. Unsurprisingly it turned out that my company had an enterprise license, and had I known whom to contact (which I didn't), I could have gotten a license key in a couple of days. But why waits days and potentially many thousands of dollars of time when I could buy a license now and get started immediately?

Frankly, it's weird how Silicon Valley employees making obscene amounts of money balk at personal expenses as if they're some minimum wage employee being victimized by their employer nickel-and-diming them. But that's just me. In fact, except at startups, Silicon Valley corporations neither expect this nor even give you credit for taking such initiative.

Post reply on HN