We Need to Talk About Docker Hub

There are a few good reasons to avoid docker hub in production environments:

- free usage is capped and throttled if you exceed download limits.

- some cloud environments don't pay for docker hub access and it's easy to exceed those limits collectively. I've seen that happen on telekom cloud a few times.

- you can configure docker on your machine to use a mirror. For example https://mirror.gcr.io. Or you can setup your own mirror of course. Most cloud environments do this for you.

Using a mirror means you can continue to use images published (by others) to docker hub. And since you don't really have much of a choice about where others publish their images, using a mirror is a good workaround.

IMHO the docker solution of simply prepending images with your registry domain is actually a decent practice. I don't get websites I browse from a central repository either.

For your own stuff, you don't really need to use dockerhub. You can just run your own repository, which isn't that hard or expensive. But of course, an empty repository isn't that useful if you mainly use stuff made by others.

Btw. docker is not unique with having a corporately owned central repository of software. Annoyingly, maven central is run by Sonatype and their process for pushing stuff there is mildly convoluted. It's stupidly easy to use a simple aws or gcp bucket as a maven repository from gradle (I do this for some of my OSS projects). Or any old server with ssh access and a web server. Github also offers repositories for a lot of stuff. But getting your library on maven central just means dealing with their bureaucracy (Jira driven!) and jumping through a lot of hoops. I've been wishing somebody would beat some sense into them or would setup a (vastly) easier to use public repository for years.

It's nice that companies offer public repositories of stuff. But it's inconvenient when they start policing/taxing access to that or put up barriers to get stuff in there. Mainly because they tend to host the vast majority of interesting dependencies that you might want to use.

IMHO the ownership of such central infrastructure ideally moves to some kind of foundation with proper governance rather than some company. For docker that could be the Linux Foundation. It's not clear to me why that responsibility lies with a tiny company for the Java ecosystem that makes a rather convoluted product for hosting jar files which at this point isn't actually that widely used since there are plenty better alternatives. Nothing against them but why delegate such a big responsibility to them?

The thing with containerization is that it is sometimes used to virtualize an OS and sometimes to virtualize processes.

My containerless worflow, when compared to typical container workflows, usually involves splitting some of the responsibilities to the OS virtualization layer and some to the process layer.

For example, if I have a testing server and a prod server, to test a change I just git push to the testing branch. Which is quite fast and reproducible.

Yes in theory there can be side effects and leftover effects from the previous version, but I am also a competent programmer and have the capacity to ssh into the server to debug, so it's not a huge issue. So bottomline I don't virtualize as often.

To take a wildly different use case of containers, if I want to have two different systems on the same machine, I just run the two different systems as processes? You know there's a process for a sql db and an http server in the server and we are fine. You can even use users for more stringent encapsulation and security guarantees, it's fine.

But since we are talking about registries, I focused on the third distinct use case deployment automation.

The whole details on how to live without docker (and docker registries by extension) won't fit a hacker news comment, but be assured it's 100% possible and you'll be fine.

I'm focusing on docker as a whole because if I can prove that you don't need Docker, by extension I prove you don't need a docker registry. It's an overkill of an argument to show how ridiculous complaining about your free docker registries is. You are out here complaining about a problem with your Docker registries, while I'm a chad who can just axe Docker like it's nothing.

These Docker "parasites" are providing dozens of free containers for Docker's customers and still have the audacity to request an email correspondence about their sponsorship status.

There's several use cases to virtualization. You might be under the illusion that you use docker for the same use cases, but you will probably find 3 or 4 use cases if you talk with other users: Deterministic testing, automated deployments, external dependency installation (docker run psql).

Besides the semantic usecases of Docker which can be infinite, technically docker is a virtualization and isolation mechanism. So whatever you do with docker can also be done with type 1, 2 virtualization or even processes and users (hint that's what docker is actually built on). There's plenty of junior programmers that learn to docker run something to isolate it without learning how to isolate with basic user permissions.

So the use case isn't really relevant when I say that you can live without docker.

In general if you ever find yourself complaining about your free stuff, I recommend that you uninstall it to show yourself you don't need it. And then you can reconsider to come back to it again from a place of gratefulness instead of demanding neediness.

They (Docker) might not be. Docker Hub is their turf, they can do whatever they want (and face the consequences).

However, the post doesn't say that LinuxServer want free service. They say that they had the opportunity, and they try every year. From what I read, they're perfectly fine with a "No, you are not selected this year".

Being decent and being interested in giving a free service are mutually exclusive. You can provide free service while being mean, you can deny people from your free service while being polite.

The people who wrote this post is only interested with the "polite" part. So, they can see what they're at and act accordingly (reapply, pay, or find other alternatives).

Requesting communication is not a bad thing.