Docker October 2022 Pricing Change FAQ

Docker October 2022 Pricing Change FAQ
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At this point, even not signing into Docker Hub is perfectly passable, because none of my CI servers ever hit the rate limits, since Nexus can act as a caching proxy, or I can just put my own images in it. It surprises me that this isn't the de-facto way of doing things, since currently it seems like Docker Hub has to deal with a needlessly large amount of network traffic and also countless dead/abandoned images stored in it (and thus, wasted $$$).

I also use a pretty simple setup of Gitea and Drone CI for building my images from a Git repo, which works rather nicely, but perhaps that's besides the point (though you can read more about it on my blog). Of course, I won't say that building most/all of your own container images is necessarily something that you should always do.

That said, personally, I decided to focus on Ubuntu as a common base image for my own needs and install software that I need (Node, Python, JDK, .NET, Ruby and so on) inside of it through apt, as well as install updates during build time. This lead to my own container images with common tools across the board, common shared layers (e.g. fewer layers to pull if a similar image is already on the server/locally), albeit with fewer space optimizations and some caveats, about which you can read in another article of mine: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-base-fo...

Overall, it's been a pretty reasonable experience, though I also understand why folks whose time is 10x more valuable than mine might prefer to throw money at someone, or go for images that have a bit more vendor dark magic in them (e.g. installing JDK through apt vs doing so in alternative ways that save on space).

As for Docker Desktop, if you want something like it, Rancher Desktop aims to be a passable alternative, though with a slightly different focus: https://rancherdesktop.io/

Personally, I don't think that they'll quite succeed anytime soon, because they have a long road ahead of them, much like Podman did (and still has, for some workloads), but it's definitely a promising alternative, given what else the corporation behind it has been capable of (Rancher, RKE and K3s come to mind).

I'd say that it's good for some scenarios.

It's not an entirely complete Docker alternative, there still being various inconsistencies, especially when there are projects like Docker Compose (which has Podman Compose under development) and even Docker Swarm (for which there is no direct alternative), or when something like Nomad support for Podman is still relatively new: https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/plugins/drivers/podman

Even then, what functionality you expect will differ for various folks, so it's going to be an instance: "But it works on my servers (for my workload and my deployments), therefore it's stable!"

Personally, I tolerate the worse architecture of Docker, just because it's widespread, reasonably stable (CLI/API wise) and I can use the same setup for both building and running containers (and even lightweight orchestration). Others might disagree, but at the end of the day use whatever works for you.

Edit: edited the post to clear up the confusion, mistakenly compared Podman with containerd, this probably threw me off: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/kubernetes-workloads-podman-... and https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/compose-kubernetes-podman (it's still not an equivalent to containerd, simply can run workloads described in Kubernetes YAML)

That said, you could probably check out Podman Desktop as well, if interested: https://podman-desktop.io/