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It's true that 1 year support is not as long as many enterprise infrastructure products. We plan to expand it over time. But we've found that it's a good fit fo
by shykes 10y ago
It's true that 1 year support is not as long as many enterprise infrastructure products. We plan to expand it over time. But we've found that it's a good fit for our current offering, and the value enterprises are getting from it.
- Keep in mind we are releasing Docker EE quarterly, and supporting every release for a year. This is attractive for enterprises who are adopting Docker in part to make their software practice more agile. They don't want to be forced to upgrade every 3 months. But they appreciate that they can. This works for Docker because it sits relatively higher on the stack. If we were providing a storage appliance, or a traditional host operating system, this wouldn't make sense
- For a company of our size and maturity (300 people, 4 year-old free product, 18 months-old paid product), earning the trust of large conservative enterprises can be hard. We do it by being honest about our abilities, conservative in what we promise, and going above and beyond to deliver on what we promised. In this case, we simply weren't confident that we could promise more than 4 simultaneous EE releases (1 year support x 4 releases per year). That might cost us sales opportunities now with more conservative buyers, but those buyers would probably have been unhappy with us anyway. We can get them later - when our product is more mature and our release and support infrastructure is more robust.
EDIT: I see other commentors confidently stating what is and isn't enterprise-ready. Remember that enterprises are, by definition, very large. There are many departments with different goals and different priorities. For some of them, Docker EE with quarterly releases and 1-year support is a good fit. For other, it's not. And that's OK.
- kupiakos 10y agoAt some point it might make sense to do something like Ubuntu: LTS releases (5 year support) every two years, and short term support often.
- jacques_chester 10y agoAs a relatable data point, Pivotal Cloud Foundry does not have LTS releases yet. We also release quarterly and make very frequent updates, usually from upstream CVEs, through Pivotal Network. Enterprises want LTSes because legacy platforms are a nightmare to install, operate and upgrade. It becomes less important as the platform itself becomes less bestial. Ultimately, enterprises want outcomes. Any given checklist item from the buying department usually represents scar tissue that may or may not still be relevant. New platforms -- Cloud Foundry, OpenShift v3, Docker EE, whichever of the thousand blooming Kubernetes offerings will succeed -- are in a position to renegotiate from first principles. You might want to look into BOSH. It's a large part of the operability secret sauce for Cloud Foundry. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we're ostensibly competitors due to the increasing overlap between Docker EE and Cloud Foundry.