8 ms·

In 2007 we used to rack hardware. Like physically open boxes, rack hardware with Ethernet cables. In 2014 I don't think a startup existed trying to use physica

• throwaway0071 9y ago
  Except you don't need Docker Inc. for that. Many container runtimes exist now, the user experience is very easy to replicate. Plus, their cloud doesn't seem to be making any money. So I too have trouble understanding where this valuation is coming from.
  • ransom1538 9y ago
    Sure. You can host your own github too. But the future will be containers. They seem pretty good at that.
    • smt88 9y ago
      You can host your own GitLab*, not your own Github. Also, a lot of the value of Github is social. You can only get that (after a certain point) by paying Github money. By contrast, you can get 100% of the value of the Docker community without paying a cent to Docker, Inc.
      • keeran 9y ago
        FWIW you can host your own GitHub https://enterprise.github.com https://enterprise.github.com
        • VT_Drew 9y ago
          $21 a month per user.....to host it on my own hardware....no thanks. If I am hosting on my own hardware then you get a one-time-fee, none of this subscription nonsense.
          • mosdave 9y ago
            glad I'm not the only one to find this subscription BS patently insulting.
            • inferiorhuman 9y ago
              You're not a 1Password user, are you? They are pushing the subscription model super hard.
        • alfalfasprout 9y ago
          and this is important because a good deal of tech companies rely on self-hosted GHE or hosted Github.
          • deleted 9y ago
            [deleted]
    • mbreese 9y ago
      The question isn't if Docker the company will be successful in the future -- it's will they be as successful as that valuation suggests by selling support contracts.
  • zjaffee 9y ago
    The kind of companies that spend large amounts of money on things like support, think more traditional enterprises, are spending a ton of money on docker's paid services, because they do not have the ability to hire enough engineers to implement something in house.
    • inferiorhuman 9y ago
      I work at a large company. We're not paying Docker for Docker, we're paying Amazon.
  • maxfurman 9y ago
    I think you are underestimating the power of a name brand. Docker is synonymous with containers to a lot of people, and if they want to pay for container support they'll pay Docker. Similar to, as other commenters have said, people pay Red Hat just so they can have someone to complain to when there's a problem.
    • radicalbyte 9y ago
      This. I've been working in Government recently, it's all containers and it's all Docker. If anything I'm surprised that their valuation isn't higher.
      • koolba 9y ago
        Are they paying Docker (the company) for anything? Or just using containers as a part of a wider software infrastructure? I've been using Docker since early 2014 and they haven't gotten a dime from me. If you count the storage and bandwidth on the public registry I've cost them money.
      • jeff_marshall 9y ago
        Is any employee of Docker, inc. critical to your use of containers? Is any copyrighted, non-OSS Docker, inc. code critical to your operations? Where does the money go.
      • hueving 9y ago
        It doesn't cost money to use the docker format. Why would they get a high valuation from no revenue?
    • throwaway5752 9y ago
      Container format brand? I bet Dell/HP/et al thought they had a datacenter advantage with their brands over whitebox, but we've seen how that has worked out. What you described is a services/support company, something Red Hat has worked really really hard not to be over the years (to debatable degree of success). Being their for support vs OSS is not how you get great margins. Anyway, at this level of the stack in prod settings brand won't take you that far.
  • gaius 9y ago
    Except you don't need Docker Inc. for that Exactly. Build your docker image with the free open source tools then push it onto Azure, for example. How does Docker the company see any revenue here? Or if you are running on-prem with DC/OS in a private cloud. I don't know anyone using Docker's own cloud, and why would you? They need to sell either services or an "Enterprise" version that is better than what you can do without them. I think containers are definitely the future, but I also see containers as being just a commodity, no more exciting that Makefiles and RPM are now. The money will be in running them, and Azure, AWS et al will have that stitched up.
    • praneshp 9y ago
      Docker has at least one product (Docker data center) that is aimed at enterprises. I know because I was almost going to go work there on that product. It's not just a container company.
  • notruthallowed 9y ago
    Lone programmers tend to never look at things from the perspective of large organizations.
  • thinbeige 9y ago
    > user experience is very easy to replicate Wrong. The built-in Docker Swarm has currently the easiest UI for container orchestration (there is still stuff which could be done better though but still). This paired with sensible defaults and batteries included, such as a load balancer make Docker the clear winner and apparantly nobody has been able to replicate the UX. I know k8s has a bigger market share but is also way more complex. Edit: Why the downvotes? Afraid that your k8s know-how will drop in market value? Please reply with valid counter arguments instead of this maddening silent downvoting. If I was wrong let me know where and why.
    • kuschku 9y ago
      The problem there is in the Enterprise market, which Docker is targeting, K8s is far better suited.
      • xorcist 9y ago
        Not only is Kubernetes in a better place than Swarm, the core Docker engine is only a cog in that machine. Should the need arise it would be trivial for them to swap it out with another own container engine. Kubernetes is the magic sauce, not Docker.
        • deleted 9y ago
          [deleted]
        • InTheArena 9y ago
          The attitude that docker is pointless and kubernetes is amazing despite Docker has been consistent from A vocal minority of the kubernetes community and it’s self serving and getting a little annoying. Is docker perfect? no. Swarm has been an absolute disaster. API stability has been dramatically undervalued. There is room for containers to grow, and their power is nowhere near tapped out. There still a lot of room for improvement on the containerization space, and docker is going to drive that, whether the kubernetes crowd likes that or not. Kubernetes is amazing and gives us a real chance to have an operating system for the data center. Kubernetes itself, despite years of investing is still ridiculously difficult to install. It still has an adoption that’s at least two orders of magnitude below baseline docker. The learning curve is still way higher than it should be. Frankly I hope that all involved get their heads out of their asses and build something great rather then continue to muscle in on each other. There is no reason for this pissing match given that it’s the combination of borg and Docker that makes solutions deployed on top of kubernetes amazing.
  • nawitus 9y ago
    So what is a good replacement for docker?
    • bdcravens 9y ago
      Keep in mind the distinction between running docker containers and what parent said: "You don't need Docker Inc for that"
    • bonzini 9y ago
      OpenShift for example. It uses docker containers and can be used for both application containers and microservices.
      • coredog64 9y ago
        A co-worker who came from AmEx related that they were so unhappy with OpenShift that they dropped the 'f' from the name for nearly every internal discussion.
        • InTheArena 9y ago
          To be fair, my understanding is that this was open shift 1 & 2. Openshoft three is more or less kubernetes with a few additional features.
        • sitepodmatt 9y ago
          Haha love it, what were the primary frustrations?
    • eatmyshorts 9y ago
      rkt, containerd, LXC, runC, OpenShift. There are others, too. rkt and OpenShift seem to be the most common ones that aren't Docker.
      • adictator 9y ago
        Openshift uses docker under the hood. It is an orchestration wrapper around docker.
  • computerex 9y ago
    Most major cloud providers provide support for docker and private docker registries out of the box.
• new299 9y ago
  Right... I just don't see that being worth 10B USD I guess. I don't see how you come up with that number, and I assume this is where the "upside potential" needs to be. In the case of AWS, I can see the advantage, you're renting a resource you need, rather than buying it. I guess I just don't see how you extract similar amounts of revenue from Docker... Redhat is valued at ~1.3B USD. Github, currently at ~2B USD. How do you justify 10B USD for Docker. Obviously you can (they did), I just don't understand how this is done well. Does anyone have a better insight here?
  • objclxt 9y ago
    > Redhat is valued at ~1.3B USD. Redhat's market cap is $17 billion, so I'm not sure where you're getting that figure from. https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:RHT https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:RHT
    • comstock 9y ago
      I guess I was looking st their total equity. But I guess you're correct and market cap would be a better number to look at.
      • HNNoLikey 9y ago
        I must admit that looking at equity as opposed to market cap seems a tad strange to me. My brain's wired to default to market cap because that's what's in the news most of the time but I suppose it would help to look at equity to shed more light into a concern's current health. However, equity might not always be the best go to element when making a determination as to whether to invest in a company. Equity doesn't take into consideration business components that haven't come into fruition just yet e.g. on going product development, future product prospects, research etc.
  • bonzini 9y ago
    Red Hat's revenues are a little short of 3 billion (though growing fast), and the market cap is about 15-20 (going by memory). That is with a full software stack going from IaaS to containers to application server. Right now containers are the thing, but what if they are going to become commodity in 5 years? And can the Docker brand compete against the Google and Red Hat brands that are also selling container management platforms (fully open source in the case of RH, no enterprise features and no lock-in)? It seems like a very generous valuation. Disclaimer: working at RH
• tw04 9y ago
  >In 2014 I don't think a startup existed trying to use physical machines - it was all aws,etc. You're also starting to see those startups realize how much money they're wasting on cloud services once they hit scale. It is EXTREMELY expensive to do cloud if you're even remotely efficient with your infrastructure unless you've got extremely bursty and unpredictable workloads.
  • anton-107 9y ago
    But in return it's also extremely cheap to bootstrap and fail
  • user5994461 9y ago
    It is much cheaper to run clouds than to buy and operate your own hardware. The cloud is also a lot easier to optimize and save money.
    • venantius 9y ago
      You're getting downvoted, but your answer is partially correct: when you're a small startup, it is almost certainly cheaper (in terms of time and operational complexity) to outsource infrastructure to the cloud. However, once you hit significant scale, the lessons from the operational experience of all of the major firms have been pretty consistent: it's cheaper to operate your own data centers than it is to outsource them.
      • localhost 9y ago
        Depends on what you mean by scale. If scale means providing services globally to many jurisdictions, you're going to have to start doing the things that the big players so like putting data centers in specific geographies (e.g., EU, China). That means getting real estate, power etc. At that point I think the scale tips in the other direction where it's now more costly for you to "scale". So, cheap at the small end, cheap at the high end and expensive in the middle (cloud).
        • 9y ago
• kristianc 9y ago
  > Now 2017+, I am starting to see containers become the defacto. Why would containers become the de facto rather than something like Cloud Foundry which abstracts it away entirely? Docker is just a slightly less messy version of the Puppet, Salt, Chef Devops BS with added complications around networking.
• nawitus 9y ago
  " I see the future as running a docker file on your laptop, running it through a ci system, then pushing it to a container service. Docker is the clear standard." Where I work this has been the standard for over a year now.
  • samstave 9y ago
    Would you mind just expanding on exactly what your ci pipeline/stack looks like which your company made its standard?
    • nawitus 9y ago
      Jenkins 2.x for building the images (we just execute docker build and push in a Jenkinsfile), then we use Kontena for orchestration (e.g. the Kontena agent pulls the image from the docker registry). For local development we use docker-compose. Jenkins and the Jenkins slaves also run on docker, and are managed by Kontena. In fact, the whole platform/pipeline runs completely on Docker. We use Ansible to install Kontena/docker on new servers.
    • nrb 9y ago
      The method I've been using successfully: 1. Git commit triggers CircleCI build and test phase 2. CircleCI deploy phase uploads the image to GKE 3. Google Container Engine stages the deployment for release
      • gkop 9y ago
        Can you link to an article on 3) ? We have been releasing by invoking kubectl from Circle, I wasn't aware that GKE can release itself.
• Silhouette 9y ago
  I wonder what advantages Docker offers over plain LXC and LXD for a lot of real world use cases these days, though. Does it have some unique, defensible benefit that justifies this sort of valuation? I haven't set up enough systems to have a strong opinion on this one myself, but those I know who definitely have seem to come down in favour of plain LXC and possibly LXD in most scenarios. Typically, their argument is that the features you probably want are there anyway, and so the extra weight of the Docker ecosystem now seems to introduce more irritations than it fixes. Sometimes they seem to distinguish between hosting on infrastructure like AWS and setting up containers with colo or closer-to-home managed hosting. I don't understand the subtleties here; can anyone enlighten me about why they might go with Docker in one case but be quite strongly against it in the other?
  • bradmwalker 9y ago
    Docker seems like a half-baked half-measure between LXD and Kubernetes. LXD is brilliant for small scale, stateful pet systems, legacy applications with nonrefactorable state, applications that already work well within a Linux distribution (e.g. integrated with systemd), applications incompatible with Docker's overlay network virtualization opinion, and is great in development for developers that are well-versed in the unix-like userland. Kubernetes is the choice for large-scale systems with immutable architecture.
  • icebraining 9y ago
    I think that essentially, the LXD project focuses on making VM-like containers (with a full OS that you SSH into, etc), whereas Docker and friends focus on immutable application containers - essentially, a zone for running a single application, and which you delete and start from scratch rather than entering and changing stuff. In fact, the LXD people have a guide on how to run Docker containers inside LXD :) https://stgraber.org/2016/04/13/lxd-2-0-docker-in-lxd-712/ https://stgraber.org/2016/04/13/lxd-2-0-docker-in-lxd-712/
    • Silhouette 9y ago
      I understand that the focus/brand of Docker is aimed at a slightly different scenario. What I'm not seeing is why -- from an objective, technical point of view -- you couldn't do almost any of the same things with plain LXC these days, perhaps with LXD on top if the vanilla UI for setting things up isn't sufficient. I mean, Docker Hub and some nice UI tools are great and all, but I don't see a USP or a defensible position worth a billion dollar valuation in there. So what is really behind the confidence that investors at this level must surely have?
• eecc 9y ago
  Meh, I'm still not impressed by Docker in the sense that you still have to hack around with configuration management, env vars and so on to approximate what JNDI provides since 20 years. Because that's what Docker is: JEE for non Java platforms