Docker
computer.rip
Docker
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Re: Docker
#2> There's been a lot of discussion lately about Docker, mostly about their boneheaded reversal following their boneheaded apology for their boneheaded decision to eliminate free teams.
So making a bad decision is bad, but admitting it was a bad decision and reversing it is also bad?
Re: Docker
#3> Still, the point of this tangent about Docker Desktop is that Docker's decision to monetize via Desktop---and in a pretty irritating way that caused a great deal of heartburn to many software companies---was probably the first tangible sign that Docker Inc. is not the benevolent force that it had long seemed to be. Suddenly Docker, the open-source tool that made our work so much easier, had an ugly clash with capitalism.
> Docker Hub, though, may yet be Docker's undoing. I can only assume that Docker did not realize the situation they were getting into. Docker images are relatively large, and Docker Hub became so central to the use of Docker that it became common for DevOps toolchains to pull images to production nodes straight from Docker Hub. Bandwidth is relatively expensive even before cloud provider margins; the cost of operating Docker Hub must have become huge. Docker Inc.'s scaffolding for the Docker community suddenly became core infrastructure for endless cloud environments, and effectively a subsidy to Docker's many users.
I'm not sure why they couldn't have been a bit more aggressive about monetization from the start?
DockerHub could have been free for an X amount of storage, with image retention of Y days by default, with Z amount of traffic allowed per month. The Internet Archive tells me that they got this half right, with "unlimited public repos" being where things went wrong: http://web.archive.org/web/20200413232159/https:/hub.docker....
> The basics of Docker for every developer, including unlimited public repos and one private repo.
For all I care, Docker Desktop might have just offered a CLI solution with the tech to run it (Hyper-V or WSL2 back ends) for free, but charge extra for the GUI and additional features, like running Kubernetes workloads. BuildKit could have been touted as an enterprise offering with immense power for improving build times, at a monetary cost.
Perhaps it all was in the name of increasing adoption initially? In a sense, I guess they succeeded, due to how common containers are. It is easy to wonder about these things after the fact, but generally people get rather upset when you give them things for free and later try to take them away, or introduce annoyances. Even if you cave to the feedback and roll back any such initiatives, the damage is already done, at least to some degree.
I still remember a piece of software called Lens one day starting to mandate that users sign in with accounts, which wasn't previously necessary. The community reacted predictably: https://github.com/lensapp/lens/issues/5444 (they also introduced a subscription plan later: https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/wakkaj/lens_6_i...)
That said, I self host my own images in a Nexus instance and will probably keep using Docker as the tooling/environment, because for my personal stuff I don't have a reason to actually switch to anything else at the moment and Docker itself is good enough. Podman Desktop and Rancher Desktop both seem viable alternatives for GUI software, whereas for the actual runtimes and cloud image registries, there are other options, though remember that you get what you pay for.
Re: Docker
#4> There's been a lot of discussion lately about Docker, mostly about their boneheaded reversal following their boneheaded apology for their boneheaded decision to eliminate free teams. So making a bad decision is bad, but admitting it was a bad decision and reversing it is also bad?
You lose a lot of goodwill from the community if you refuse to change the code that a `docker pull image` no longer defaults to hub.docker.com AND then start to monetize teams, ESPECIALLY non-commercial open-source teams.
If they would mandate a registry then many more people would host their own and take the load off of their system.
But no, they want to have it all. And yea, they can. That I don't care about.
But you can't make a change, and walk back from it, and expect people to be happy, given the story that came before all of this.
Re: Docker
#5> There's been a lot of discussion lately about Docker, mostly about their boneheaded reversal following their boneheaded apology for their boneheaded decision to eliminate free teams. So making a bad decision is bad, but admitting it was a bad decision and reversing it is also bad?
Very often reversing a decision is not even comparable to having never taken it.
Currently the situation is that a lot of people will think twice before generating any dependencies with free teams, or perhaps Docker altogether.
Re: Docker
#6The narrative seems quite clear to me. They released the tooling and the services to become the defacto solution, and then Swarm was supposed to be the cashcow that turned that into cashflow. And then k8s happened.
They've raised a tonne of capital, and it probably looked sane at the time. And now they're grasping at straws trying to figure out how else they can turn this into revenue.
A lot of the recent narrative has been worded like pivoting into a glorified webhost was their evil plan all along. It's not, it's an act of desperation.
Re: Docker
#7> There's been a lot of discussion lately about Docker, mostly about their boneheaded reversal following their boneheaded apology for their boneheaded decision to eliminate free teams. So making a bad decision is bad, but admitting it was a bad decision and reversing it is also bad?
Very often reversing a decision is not even comparable to having never taken it. Currently the situation is that a lot of people will think twice before generating any dependencies with free teams, or perhaps Docker altogether.
Absolutely. The ones I hear are moving away from Docker Hub are currently not moving away from it because they have to, as Docker Inc reversed their decision. They are moving away from Docker Hub because they want to avoid getting hurt in the future, as Docker Inc proved they don't really care about them unless it becomes a PR disaster, and next time there might not be one.
Re: Docker
#8> There's been a lot of discussion lately about Docker, mostly about their boneheaded reversal following their boneheaded apology for their boneheaded decision to eliminate free teams. So making a bad decision is bad, but admitting it was a bad decision and reversing it is also bad?
Announcing it damaged their reputation. Reversing doesn't undo that (because there's always the chance they'll do it again), but now they don't even have the benefit of not having to host so many images.
Re: Docker
#9The narrative seems quite clear to me. They released the tooling and the services to become the defacto solution, and then Swarm was supposed to be the cashcow that turned that into cashflow. And then k8s happened. They've raised a tonne of capital, and it probably looked sane at the time. And now they're grasping at straws trying to figure out how else they can turn this into revenue. A lot of the recent narrative h…
I feel like all that VC money was actually their undoing. Instead of working with the community, Docker spent bucketloads of money acquiring a lot of community projects and startups in an obvious attempt to become an end-to-end container solution company. But, they didn't have a plan and ended up killing most of those acquisitions. To me, it felt like Docker was using all the money they got to squash the community instead of working with it.
Every year at DockerCon, there would be flashy announcements that went nowhere. As a developer, those years from 2013 to 2017 were both super exciting and super frustrating. Everything started falling apart when Docker (the project) got split into Moby for open source and the rest went commercial. Docker started to sell Docker Swarm (the original), only to kill it a year later with a new Docker Swarm (what we have today). Then, Kubernetes started growing traction, leapfrogging both Docker Swarms, Mesos, and others in adoption. They never had a cohesive commercial plan. Just lots of empty promises and burned bridges.
When I think of Docker (the company), I feel bitter about all the projects they killed in their attempt to own the market. I love using Docker (the software), but the company's just one big disappointment.
Re: Docker
#10I’m someone who had a front row seat to the emergence of Docker, and some might say competed with them (I’d disagree on that point). I don’t plan on commenting on their company, business model, or recent decisions. The only thing I want to comment on is the claim Docker was evolutionary, not revolutionary.
I disagree, I believe Docker /was/ revolutionary. And I feel like I see heavy technologists make this sort of dismissal based on technical points too soon. From a technical perspective, it was arguably evolutionary — a lot of people were poking at LXC and containerization a long time before Docker came around — but from a product perspective it was surely revolutionary.
I used to joke, in my own experience building a business in the DevOps space, that you’d spend 2 years building a globally distributed highly scalable complex piece of software, and no one would pay for it. Then you slap a GUI on it, and suddenly someone is willing to pay a million dollars for it. Now, that’s mostly tongue in cheek, but there is a kernel of truth to it.
The kernel of truth is that the technology itself isn’t valuable; it’s the /humanization/ of a technology, how it interfaces with the people who use it every day.
So what Docker did that was revolutionary was take a bunch of disparate pieces, glue them together, and put an incredible user experience on top of it so that that technology was now instantly available in minutes to just about anyone who cared.
At some point in the article, the author says it’s maybe something about a “workflow.” I’m… highly biased to say yes, absolutely. One of my core philosophies (that became the 1st point of the Tao of the company I helped start) is “workflows, not technologies.” When I talk about it, I mean it in a slightly different way, but it’s highly related: the workflow is super valuable for adoption, the technology is to a certain extent, but less so.
Technology enthusiasts (hey, I’m one of you!) usually hate to hear this. We all want to think you build the best thing or a revolutionary thing and then it just wins. That’s sometimes, but rarely, the case. You need that aspect, and you ALSO need timing to be right, the interface to be right, the explanation to be right, etc. Docker got this all right.
(Now, turning the above success into a business is a whole different can of worms, and like I said in the first paragraph, I don’t plan on commenting.)
For the author: I don’t mean any offense by this. I mostly agree with the other points of your post. The “FROM” being revolutionary I was nodding quite vigorously. Being able to “docker run ubuntu” was super magical, etc. I mostly wanted to point this because I see MANY technologists dismiss the excitement of technologies purely on the basis of technology over, and over, and over again, and the sad thing is its just one part of a much bigger package.