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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

#5
The problem I see with their business model is that the technology has long been commoditized, and alternatives are often better. It's a pretty tough spot to be in.

Anecdotally, I use Colima on my Mac, and it is better than Docker Desktop in pretty much every way I can think of. I'm sure I'm not alone.

Generally, a company like Docker would sell support agreements (ie: how Red Hat does it), but selling support to developers rather than to support core infrastructure/production deployments probably wouldn't work. I hope they can figure it out and succeed.

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

#6
Our company pays for Docker Desktop licenses, but we've made every other effort to not rely on Docker directly (e.g. DockerHub) to avoid the SPF. Pull-through caches with ECR were a quick way to drastically reduce reliance further.

Given the state of our internal tooling, we can conceivably move to podman or similar within the next year if the license fees become onerous, but, given the size of our org, we likely will just keep forking over license fees as it's cheaper than the salary to remove the dependency.

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

#7
The buildkit tooling such as `docker buildx bake` is great. I haven't seen this level of innovation from the other OCI builders that are aiming to replace Docker.

I found the first scenario that I actually wanted to pay Docker for- a dedicated, hosted Buildx runner. Not some multi-tenant thing that reads and writes a slow cache to S3 before and after every build. A fast one, that keeps the cache hot.

I'd pay 2x whatever the EC2 instance cost would be to have this managed and updated automatically.

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

#8
I remember everyone had written Docker off for dead when they announced their updated pricing plans, but they really made perfect sense, and I am happy to see the company recover. A large chunk of the tech world today relies on their products, but they were making next to nothing for it. It is definitely worth it for large companies to throw a few dollars their way considering the massive amount of value they are getting out of it. Whereas my company had no use for their earlier product offerings (private Docker Hub repos, Docker Swarm) we gladly paid money for Docker Desktop without even thinking about it.

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

#9
post #5

The problem I see with their business model is that the technology has long been commoditized, and alternatives are often better. It's a pretty tough spot to be in. Anecdotally, I use Colima on my Mac, and it is better than Docker Desktop in pretty much every way I can think of. I'm sure I'm not alone. Generally, a company like Docker would sell support agreements (ie: how Red Hat does it), but selling support to dev…

This issue was brought up in the initial hacker news thread, when Docker was moving towards this pricing model. Here we are, $120M ARR later.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28369570

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

#10

Our company pays for Docker Desktop licenses, but we've made every other effort to not rely on Docker directly (e.g. DockerHub) to avoid the SPF. Pull-through caches with ECR were a quick way to drastically reduce reliance further. Given the state of our internal tooling, we can conceivably move to podman or similar within the next year if the license fees become onerous, but, given the size of our org, we likely wil…

I feel like it's also good to pay in order to support the company, so long as they continue to provide something of value.
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