11 ms·

Has there ever been a bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker managed to preside over? They could have created a huge business, but the product and g

Has there ever been a bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker managed to preside over? They could have created a huge business, but the product and go to market strategy has been awful. In my opinion, selling a PaaS was fundamentally the wrong call when they could have licensed an enterprise version of the engine and taken a commission on every server in existence. This is more a Microsoft or RHEL type business rather than a second rate Pivotal or OpenShift, which in themselves are being mullered by EKS/AKS in enterprise. The whole pitch towards legacy apps was also short termist distraction when investment dollars are all going to cloud native solutions. Legacy apps are a big business case but getting companies to invest in their legacy estate is still a tough ask. This angle should have been secondary to competing where they are naturally strong.

nickstinemates 7y ago
> Has there ever been a bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker managed to preside over? They could have created a huge business, but the product and go to market strategy has been awful. The stories I could tell.. needless to say, looking back at the wasted opportunity is truly depressing.
- pstuart 7y ago
  We like those kinds of stories around here...
  - nickstinemates 7y ago
    Like the time when Kubernetes, prior to it being announced, could have been a joint collaboration between Docker and Google.
    - honkycat 7y ago
      I am amazed at how Docker bricked on Docker Swarm so hard. I assert to this day that the only conclusion to choosing Docker Swarm is to rewrite a worse version of Kubernetes.
      - voidmain0001 7y ago
        This developer, Gerhard Lazu, states otherwise regarding Kubernetes as he describes the infrastructure that he built for changelog.com based on Docker Swarm rather than K8s: https://changelog.com/podcast/254 https://changelog.com/podcast/254
      - nickstinemates 7y ago
        Especially given we used to have Meetups at the office every Thursday night, where at least 1 new Orchestration project was launched/demoed every week. The initial project the team worked on was called Beam. After about 6 months and no progress to show, the conversations referenced above happened and this is the result.. Kubernetes launched at the first DockerCon[1], early 2014. Swarm was launched[2] in beta in Dec 2014. So, roughly 1 year late to market, 6 months after initial K8 launch. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrxnVKZeqK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrxnVKZeqK8 2: https://blog.docker.com/2014/12/announcing-docker-machine-swarm-and-compose-for-orchestrating-distributed-apps/ https://blog.docker.com/2014/12/announcing-docker-machine-sw...
        cpuguy83 7y ago
        I still rather like some of the output beam (libchan), just that GRPC came along and it's all history now. But yes agreed this was all completely frustrating at the time, and completely depressing now.
    - donmcronald 7y ago
      That might have been great for Docker the company, but I wonder how it would have been for Docker the technology. Maybe Kubernetes would have ended up being less open. I don't know much about it beyond my own perception, but I think of the cloud vendors are doing as much as possible to seem neutral / safe while usurping business logic at every turn. Things like an API gateway that's specific to a cloud provider seem like nothing more than super risky vendor lock-in to me. Another example is all the serverless rage with tech like Lambda@Edge and the equivalents. Who's realistically going to move that type of stuff between providers once they hit a certain scale? However, I don't have that same cynical view of Docker. For me, Docker has become a safe bet of sorts. I know that anything running in a Docker container is pretty safe in terms of portability between cloud providers, so it becomes the default choice for me whenever possible.
      - nickstinemates 7y ago
        > However, I don't have that same cynical view of Docker. For me, Docker has become a safe bet of sorts. I know that anything running in a Docker container is pretty safe in terms of portability between cloud providers, so it becomes the default choice for me whenever possible. That's great to hear as it means it has served its initial intended purpose. We take it for granted now, but the mere concept of doing this so easily in 2014 was really exciting stuff, especially when the workflow of build->publish to N cloud services is measured in minutes/seconds not hours/days.
    - zapita 7y ago
      Wasn’t Kubernetes introduced at Dockercon, and entirely built around Docker from day one? Seems like a pretty close collaboration to me. What kind of collaboration could have taken place beyond that?
      - TheDong 7y ago
        The two-ish years of Docker Swarm trying to fight with k8s and the weird tensions around Docker as the runtime in k8s probably wouldn't have happened if Docker had decided to join forces rather than actively compete. Anyone familiar with how the swarm and k8s politics played out would know it was not a collaboration at all.
        zapita 7y ago
        I agree that Docker took too long to embrace Kubernetes once it was obvious it had more momentum than all other orchestration projects combined. But nickstinemates suggests that Docker could have and should have “collaborated” much sooner than that, even before Kubernetes had launched. I wonder what that means in practice. What exactly should Docker have done, that they didn’t? And how would it have changed the outcome?
        wmf 7y ago
        Docker could have never created Swarm and Compose at all. In hindsight if they went all-in on k8s from the beginning then they might now be the leader in enterprise k8s instead of Red Hat and IBM would be buying them. But this wasn't clear at all in 2014-2015.
        cpuguy83 7y ago
        Compose existed before k8s, and was created by a small company that Docker acquihired.
        GordonS 7y ago
        Personally, I like Docker Compose and Swarm, at the very least for non-production workloads - they're just so much lighter and simpler than k8s. I actually would have liked to see Docker not give up on Swarm so readily. There's absolutely room for a something simpler than k8s.
    - cpuguy83 7y ago
      This is definitely true, but as you say orchestration frameworks were a dime a dozen at the time, and Kubernetes, when launched at Dockercon, was barely that. Of course we actively chose to not collaborate on it, even after it matured a bit and had a good community.
- cpuguy83 7y ago
  You once told me that if we (the company) don't succeed it will absolutely be our own fault. So many avenues to (huge) success, shutdown hard by the wrong attitudes towards the rest of the market.
  - nickstinemates 7y ago
    Well, we did what we could and hopefully learned a bit in the process
jasallen 7y ago
> Has there ever been a bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker managed to preside over? Sun Microsystems
- mongol 7y ago
  Do you want to elaborate?
  - etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
    Java.
  - geofft 7y ago
    https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ from 2002 talks about it a bit: > Sun is the loose cannon of the computer industry. Unable to see past their raging fear and loathing of Microsoft, they adopt strategies based on anger rather than self-interest. Sun’s two strategies are (a) make software a commodity by promoting and developing free software (Star Office, Linux, Apache, Gnome, etc), and (b) make hardware a commodity by promoting Java, with its bytecode architecture and [write-once-run-anywhere]. OK, Sun, pop quiz: when the music stops, where are you going to sit down? Sun had all sorts of good tech, worth paying for, and couldn't figure out how to make people pay for it.
    - tw04 7y ago
      >Sun had all sorts of good tech, worth paying for, and couldn't figure out how to make people pay for it. Sun had excellent engineers but no adults in the room focused on selling the tech or making money. They got drunk off the dotbomb cash influx. They saw that they needed to open source Solaris to properly compete with Linux (and arguably they weren't too late) - but they didn't actually have a plan to make MONEY off that. You can't both give away all your software while simultaneously trying to switch to x86 hardware at the time when x86 had already become a race to the bottom...
      - 7y ago
shawabawa3 7y ago
> they could have licensed an enterprise version of the engine and taken a commission on every server in existence Sounds like a great way to kill docker completely
- benjaminwootton 7y ago
  Again I refer you to RHEL who have an open source version and an enterprise subscription. The Docker Engine taking a similar route rather than building another PaaS and bumping heads with Kubernetes seems an altogether more differentiated and defensible business model.
  - danieldk 7y ago
    Again I refer you to RHEL who have an open source version and an enterprise subscription. But the enterprise version is the open source version. Red Hat just didn't provide the binaries, now they even provide the binaries (since they acquired CentOS). Since White Box Linux, CentOS, and Scientific were started (which was pretty quickly after they launched enterprise Linux), they have been selling per-machine support and 'blame us when it does not work' licenses. A similar approach may have worked, but it is not a given. Red Hat and SUSE arrived on the market when there we no big open source support companies. Once containerization turned out to be a good idea, the other open source companies could quickly adopt and provide support contracts for the same tech (which they have done).
    - BossingAround 7y ago
      Red Hat and CentOS don't have any official relationship. It's CoreOS you're referring to. RHEL's binaries may be available for some SW, but license-wise cannot be used for production workloads unless explicitly stated. CentOS can be used for whatever you wish, but that's not a RH binary of course.
      - zaat 7y ago
        Totally official relationships: https://community.redhat.com/centos-faq/ https://community.redhat.com/centos-faq/
stefan_ 7y ago
The core of docker is just cgroups, and, well, they didn't develop it, that is in the Linux kernel and GPL. What exactly would an enterprise version offer that would make someone pay a per-server licensing cost?
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  > What exactly would an enterprise version offer that would make someone pay a per-server licensing cost? Orchestration. Compose/Swarm, which Google gave away for free as k8s (In the interest of completeness, I'll add Hashicorp's Nomad will also orchestrate containers as well as binaries). The idea of Docker monetizing died with that action by Google (and to a lesser extent, Hashicorp, although Nomad does have an enterprise version which corps are paying for and using). Google needed something to slow down AWS adoption, and Docker was collateral damage. The rest of necessary tooling for container management (build, pull, push, local dev management, registries) is fairly trivial [1]. Now anyone can run Kubernetes (or Nomad), either self-hosted or with a hosted provider, which is great for the industry but not so good for Docker. [1] https://github.com/p8952/bocker https://github.com/p8952/bocker (Docker implemented in around 100 lines of bash)
  - onlydeadheroes 7y ago
    As opposed to K8 implemented in around 100 million lines of whatever.
- benjaminwootton 7y ago
  Security features, support, integration with a Docker Data Centre type management console and other complementary tools. Exactly the same model as Redhat RHEL, who incidentally are the only profitable open source company ever.
  - ibly31 7y ago
    Hortonworks was profitable before Cloudera acquisition. Rob Bearden was CEO of Hortonworks before coming to Docker as well.
CrankyBear 7y ago
Biggest? Nah. Like so many tech companies, Docker didn't have a business plan. Or,well they did have one, which they mishandled, based around container orchestration. But, then along came Kubernetes and that was that.
neom 7y ago
DigitalOcean.
pbreit 7y ago
I never understood how it was even possible for a relatively small sliver of the dev stack to command a $1b valuation.
- phillipcarter 7y ago
  Yep, this is it. Great technology, but it's not _the_ technology for developers, as the past years have clearly shown.
  - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
    what else is used in production commonly?
    - phillipcarter 7y ago
      "Production" is a very broad set of environments, many of which containers are completely irrelevant for. For some developers, the answer to your question is "ClickOnce" because they're building a Windows Forms application that is critical to their business.
      - meddlepal 7y ago
        I think folks miss this point all too often. Docker is like an engine. Every vehicle needs an engine but there are a shit ton of engine options. Ultimately the valuable bit is the vehicle or what you do with it, not the engine. Folks get too focused on the deeply primitive tools and miss the larger picture.
        MuffinFlavored 7y ago
        I can pinky promise you that the majority of the larger picture that is up to date / building net new stuff uses Docker, which is why I was looking for alternatives that are popular (because I'm not aware of any and I don't think ClickOnce has any significant market share...)
    - 7y ago
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
I agree it was a missed opportunity, but: 1) Is there another company that benefited from that missed opportunity? No. K8S is free and it "makes money" in the sense that it's a great on-ramp for GCP, and therefore GCP is happy to subsidize it. 2) It's never too easy to be the "first" company to break into a new technology or opportunity. Look at Altavista, and how it lost to Google in just a few years, despite when Google started Altavista was already a huge company. 3) I am not sure that your proposed solution would have worked, at least in terms of making Docker successful. It is the obvious alternative, but hard to be certain that its outcome would have been a better one for Docker (the company).
- blaisio 7y ago
  There are dozens of companies providing kubernetes with various levels of management, and there are also many companies selling addons. It's a huge market, and Docker captured almost none of it. Considering Docker literally developed the underlying technology, and a lot of the complexity and capabilities of Kubernetes come from its design, they had a tremendous advantage that was squandered. Google clearly had a huge advantage too since they have been using containers for years. But Docker certainly was in a good place.
  - zaphirplane 7y ago
    Exactly a good model is puppet labs. They have a enterprise version and a go to consultancy They seem to be surviving. I hope in this age of the cloud From memory docker and some of its engineers and managers where at logger heads with redhat and google see rocket, systemd containers, podman and k8s This forced docker to commoditise it’s tech or docker was slowly boiled into commoditised component Signed arm chair warrior
    - not_real_acct 7y ago
      > Exactly a good model is puppet labs. They have a enterprise version and a go to consultancy They seem to be surviving. I hope in this age of the cloud Their CEO stepped down three years ago: https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2016/09/luke_kanies_founder_of_portlan.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2016/09/luke_kanie... The new CEO has ONE expertise, which is winding down bankrupt tech companies: http://thedronegirl.com/2018/09/14/airware-closing/ http://thedronegirl.com/2018/09/14/airware-closing/
brown9-2 7y ago
The problem is that Docker engine alone is not much of a project, you need something higher level to control which containers run on which machines.
nullwasamistake 7y ago
I agree it's a mess. We have docker swarm, docker compose, "regular" docker, the Moby fiasco. I'm just waiting for Enterprise Docker Faces to surface at this point. Kubernetes isn't that great but it's less of a disaster than the current docker ecosystem. I'm convinced another player will come in taking the best of both and give us something reasonable to work with. Maybe in 5 years or so... Istio looks promising. The missing piece has always been convenient inter-container communication. I think something with mesh and gRPC baked into the core for strong service contracts would blow everyone else away.
rodgerd 7y ago
> Has there ever been a bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker managed to preside over? Digital had VMS, and lost slowly in the marketplace until they lost Dave Cutler to Microsoft, then VMS started collapsing. Cutler showed what he could achieve with decent backing and a company not wedded to selling expensive proprietary hardware. Digital had the Alpha processor. Digital had the StrongARM processor, the fastest commodity ARM chip on the market, and sold it to Intel because what future did ARM have anyway? Digital had AltaVista. There's plenty more, but those are some highlights.
- dfrage 7y ago
  Xerox and the personal computer at the level of what became engineering workstations. The book Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer covers this fairly well as I remember.
CamouflagedKiwi 7y ago
That wasn't a likely outcome; containers are too critical to platforms like Kubernetes for those platforms to allow them to be locked up by a company with an enterprise subscription. Also they aren't hard enough for that to work; there's lots of experts out there around namespaces that would write an alternative container runtime before getting locked in that way. The elephant in the room for Docker is that there's not an effective way to monetise it - Docker Hub subscriptions clearly aren't going to cut it for a company with lots of investment and hundreds of employees.
- bsaul 7y ago
  In retrospect they should have partenered with a company like digitalocean to create a docker cloud platform.
  - nickstinemates 7y ago
    My job was to create these opportunities and they were there - internal politics prohibited them from getting done. Prior to all of the Docker as a Service endpoints getting launched, there was an internal pitch for a Docker as a Service program aimed at all of the cloud vendors as part of a Docker ubiquity/available everywhere strategy. The push back internally was that we should create these integrations and sell them to the cloud vendors. That was never going to work, but, about 3 years past the mark we started talking publicly about 'Docker Editions.' A little late to the party by then..
sagichmal 7y ago
Docker never had a viable business model, this was obvious to everyone in the space since day 1.
- nickstinemates 7y ago
  I disagree. From the inside, there were a few obvious business models. The reality was bifurcation of effort and lack of alignment.
  - sagichmal 7y ago
    From the outside, there weren’t. App Store model with Docker Hub was never going anywhere without an entrenched platform, which you couldn’t possibly build because you didn’t have the talent (no offense at all here, the market was and is insane) and even if you had, there was too much competition from other players. Licensing wasn’t feasible, not enough value-add, and too many viable alternatives waiting in the wings for you to overplay that hand. And any secondary market that showed promise was already swarming with other companies “integrating” with Docker and making their own value props. What alternatives were there? I never saw one.
windexh8er 7y ago
> The whole pitch towards legacy apps was also short termist distraction when investment dollars are all going to cloud native solutions. Legacy apps are a big business case but getting companies to invest in their legacy estate is still a tough ask. Don't even get me started. Leadership wanted Docker to sell "MTA" (Migrate Traditional Apps) and Docker probably spent a few million to the middleware folks sitting in a room developing "archetypes" instead of TCO to position with the customer as output of the time and money containerizing those apps would save. Instead the push from sales leadership was "sell them on the value". What value? We couldn't prove we were providing any unless we did the containerization. And in the case where we could get services to handle a few freebies they were always the easy ones that didn't truly show anything. It was and is a horrible miss. I'm not sure if that's what they're still focused on but it didn't resonate with customers or prospects. Right before I left Docker was moving into positioning Docker Enterprise for Desktop. They had ridiculously high limits on seat sales and we're going to charge ridiculous premiums per seat. Clearly nobody in leadership realized that the UI provided to bootstrap some simple framework wasn't worth that. But nope... So many wasted resources on products that add no value.

nickstinemates 7y ago

> Has there ever been a bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker managed to preside over? They could have created a huge business, but the product and go to market strategy has been awful. The stories I could tell.. needless to say, looking back at the wasted opportunity is truly depressing.

pstuart 7y ago
We like those kinds of stories around here...
- nickstinemates 7y ago
  Like the time when Kubernetes, prior to it being announced, could have been a joint collaboration between Docker and Google.
  - honkycat 7y ago
    I am amazed at how Docker bricked on Docker Swarm so hard. I assert to this day that the only conclusion to choosing Docker Swarm is to rewrite a worse version of Kubernetes.
    - voidmain0001 7y ago
      This developer, Gerhard Lazu, states otherwise regarding Kubernetes as he describes the infrastructure that he built for changelog.com based on Docker Swarm rather than K8s: https://changelog.com/podcast/254 https://changelog.com/podcast/254
    - nickstinemates 7y ago
      Especially given we used to have Meetups at the office every Thursday night, where at least 1 new Orchestration project was launched/demoed every week. The initial project the team worked on was called Beam. After about 6 months and no progress to show, the conversations referenced above happened and this is the result.. Kubernetes launched at the first DockerCon[1], early 2014. Swarm was launched[2] in beta in Dec 2014. So, roughly 1 year late to market, 6 months after initial K8 launch. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrxnVKZeqK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrxnVKZeqK8 2: https://blog.docker.com/2014/12/announcing-docker-machine-swarm-and-compose-for-orchestrating-distributed-apps/ https://blog.docker.com/2014/12/announcing-docker-machine-sw...
      - cpuguy83 7y ago
        I still rather like some of the output beam (libchan), just that GRPC came along and it's all history now. But yes agreed this was all completely frustrating at the time, and completely depressing now.
  - donmcronald 7y ago
    That might have been great for Docker the company, but I wonder how it would have been for Docker the technology. Maybe Kubernetes would have ended up being less open. I don't know much about it beyond my own perception, but I think of the cloud vendors are doing as much as possible to seem neutral / safe while usurping business logic at every turn. Things like an API gateway that's specific to a cloud provider seem like nothing more than super risky vendor lock-in to me. Another example is all the serverless rage with tech like Lambda@Edge and the equivalents. Who's realistically going to move that type of stuff between providers once they hit a certain scale? However, I don't have that same cynical view of Docker. For me, Docker has become a safe bet of sorts. I know that anything running in a Docker container is pretty safe in terms of portability between cloud providers, so it becomes the default choice for me whenever possible.
    - nickstinemates 7y ago
      > However, I don't have that same cynical view of Docker. For me, Docker has become a safe bet of sorts. I know that anything running in a Docker container is pretty safe in terms of portability between cloud providers, so it becomes the default choice for me whenever possible. That's great to hear as it means it has served its initial intended purpose. We take it for granted now, but the mere concept of doing this so easily in 2014 was really exciting stuff, especially when the workflow of build->publish to N cloud services is measured in minutes/seconds not hours/days.
  - zapita 7y ago
    Wasn’t Kubernetes introduced at Dockercon, and entirely built around Docker from day one? Seems like a pretty close collaboration to me. What kind of collaboration could have taken place beyond that?
    - TheDong 7y ago
      The two-ish years of Docker Swarm trying to fight with k8s and the weird tensions around Docker as the runtime in k8s probably wouldn't have happened if Docker had decided to join forces rather than actively compete. Anyone familiar with how the swarm and k8s politics played out would know it was not a collaboration at all.
      - zapita 7y ago
        I agree that Docker took too long to embrace Kubernetes once it was obvious it had more momentum than all other orchestration projects combined. But nickstinemates suggests that Docker could have and should have “collaborated” much sooner than that, even before Kubernetes had launched. I wonder what that means in practice. What exactly should Docker have done, that they didn’t? And how would it have changed the outcome?
        wmf 7y ago
        Docker could have never created Swarm and Compose at all. In hindsight if they went all-in on k8s from the beginning then they might now be the leader in enterprise k8s instead of Red Hat and IBM would be buying them. But this wasn't clear at all in 2014-2015.
        cpuguy83 7y ago
        Compose existed before k8s, and was created by a small company that Docker acquihired.
        GordonS 7y ago
        Personally, I like Docker Compose and Swarm, at the very least for non-production workloads - they're just so much lighter and simpler than k8s. I actually would have liked to see Docker not give up on Swarm so readily. There's absolutely room for a something simpler than k8s.
  - cpuguy83 7y ago
    This is definitely true, but as you say orchestration frameworks were a dime a dozen at the time, and Kubernetes, when launched at Dockercon, was barely that. Of course we actively chose to not collaborate on it, even after it matured a bit and had a good community.
cpuguy83 7y ago
You once told me that if we (the company) don't succeed it will absolutely be our own fault. So many avenues to (huge) success, shutdown hard by the wrong attitudes towards the rest of the market.
- nickstinemates 7y ago
  Well, we did what we could and hopefully learned a bit in the process

jasallen 7y ago

> Has there ever been a bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker managed to preside over? Sun Microsystems

mongol 7y ago
Do you want to elaborate?
- etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
  Java.
- geofft 7y ago
  https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ from 2002 talks about it a bit: > Sun is the loose cannon of the computer industry. Unable to see past their raging fear and loathing of Microsoft, they adopt strategies based on anger rather than self-interest. Sun’s two strategies are (a) make software a commodity by promoting and developing free software (Star Office, Linux, Apache, Gnome, etc), and (b) make hardware a commodity by promoting Java, with its bytecode architecture and [write-once-run-anywhere]. OK, Sun, pop quiz: when the music stops, where are you going to sit down? Sun had all sorts of good tech, worth paying for, and couldn't figure out how to make people pay for it.
  - tw04 7y ago
    >Sun had all sorts of good tech, worth paying for, and couldn't figure out how to make people pay for it. Sun had excellent engineers but no adults in the room focused on selling the tech or making money. They got drunk off the dotbomb cash influx. They saw that they needed to open source Solaris to properly compete with Linux (and arguably they weren't too late) - but they didn't actually have a plan to make MONEY off that. You can't both give away all your software while simultaneously trying to switch to x86 hardware at the time when x86 had already become a race to the bottom...
    - 7y ago

shawabawa3 7y ago

> they could have licensed an enterprise version of the engine and taken a commission on every server in existence Sounds like a great way to kill docker completely

benjaminwootton 7y ago
Again I refer you to RHEL who have an open source version and an enterprise subscription. The Docker Engine taking a similar route rather than building another PaaS and bumping heads with Kubernetes seems an altogether more differentiated and defensible business model.
- danieldk 7y ago
  Again I refer you to RHEL who have an open source version and an enterprise subscription. But the enterprise version is the open source version. Red Hat just didn't provide the binaries, now they even provide the binaries (since they acquired CentOS). Since White Box Linux, CentOS, and Scientific were started (which was pretty quickly after they launched enterprise Linux), they have been selling per-machine support and 'blame us when it does not work' licenses. A similar approach may have worked, but it is not a given. Red Hat and SUSE arrived on the market when there we no big open source support companies. Once containerization turned out to be a good idea, the other open source companies could quickly adopt and provide support contracts for the same tech (which they have done).
  - BossingAround 7y ago
    Red Hat and CentOS don't have any official relationship. It's CoreOS you're referring to. RHEL's binaries may be available for some SW, but license-wise cannot be used for production workloads unless explicitly stated. CentOS can be used for whatever you wish, but that's not a RH binary of course.
    - zaat 7y ago
      Totally official relationships: https://community.redhat.com/centos-faq/ https://community.redhat.com/centos-faq/

stefan_ 7y ago

The core of docker is just cgroups, and, well, they didn't develop it, that is in the Linux kernel and GPL. What exactly would an enterprise version offer that would make someone pay a per-server licensing cost?

toomuchtodo 7y ago
> What exactly would an enterprise version offer that would make someone pay a per-server licensing cost? Orchestration. Compose/Swarm, which Google gave away for free as k8s (In the interest of completeness, I'll add Hashicorp's Nomad will also orchestrate containers as well as binaries). The idea of Docker monetizing died with that action by Google (and to a lesser extent, Hashicorp, although Nomad does have an enterprise version which corps are paying for and using). Google needed something to slow down AWS adoption, and Docker was collateral damage. The rest of necessary tooling for container management (build, pull, push, local dev management, registries) is fairly trivial [1]. Now anyone can run Kubernetes (or Nomad), either self-hosted or with a hosted provider, which is great for the industry but not so good for Docker. [1] https://github.com/p8952/bocker https://github.com/p8952/bocker (Docker implemented in around 100 lines of bash)
- onlydeadheroes 7y ago
  As opposed to K8 implemented in around 100 million lines of whatever.
benjaminwootton 7y ago
Security features, support, integration with a Docker Data Centre type management console and other complementary tools. Exactly the same model as Redhat RHEL, who incidentally are the only profitable open source company ever.
- ibly31 7y ago
  Hortonworks was profitable before Cloudera acquisition. Rob Bearden was CEO of Hortonworks before coming to Docker as well.

CrankyBear 7y ago

Biggest? Nah. Like so many tech companies, Docker didn't have a business plan. Or,well they did have one, which they mishandled, based around container orchestration. But, then along came Kubernetes and that was that.

neom 7y ago

DigitalOcean.

pbreit 7y ago

I never understood how it was even possible for a relatively small sliver of the dev stack to command a $1b valuation.

phillipcarter 7y ago
Yep, this is it. Great technology, but it's not _the_ technology for developers, as the past years have clearly shown.
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  what else is used in production commonly?
  - phillipcarter 7y ago
    "Production" is a very broad set of environments, many of which containers are completely irrelevant for. For some developers, the answer to your question is "ClickOnce" because they're building a Windows Forms application that is critical to their business.
    - meddlepal 7y ago
      I think folks miss this point all too often. Docker is like an engine. Every vehicle needs an engine but there are a shit ton of engine options. Ultimately the valuable bit is the vehicle or what you do with it, not the engine. Folks get too focused on the deeply primitive tools and miss the larger picture.
      - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
        I can pinky promise you that the majority of the larger picture that is up to date / building net new stuff uses Docker, which is why I was looking for alternatives that are popular (because I'm not aware of any and I don't think ClickOnce has any significant market share...)
  - 7y ago

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

I agree it was a missed opportunity, but: 1) Is there another company that benefited from that missed opportunity? No. K8S is free and it "makes money" in the sense that it's a great on-ramp for GCP, and therefore GCP is happy to subsidize it. 2) It's never too easy to be the "first" company to break into a new technology or opportunity. Look at Altavista, and how it lost to Google in just a few years, despite when Google started Altavista was already a huge company. 3) I am not sure that your proposed solution would have worked, at least in terms of making Docker successful. It is the obvious alternative, but hard to be certain that its outcome would have been a better one for Docker (the company).

blaisio 7y ago
There are dozens of companies providing kubernetes with various levels of management, and there are also many companies selling addons. It's a huge market, and Docker captured almost none of it. Considering Docker literally developed the underlying technology, and a lot of the complexity and capabilities of Kubernetes come from its design, they had a tremendous advantage that was squandered. Google clearly had a huge advantage too since they have been using containers for years. But Docker certainly was in a good place.
- zaphirplane 7y ago
  Exactly a good model is puppet labs. They have a enterprise version and a go to consultancy They seem to be surviving. I hope in this age of the cloud From memory docker and some of its engineers and managers where at logger heads with redhat and google see rocket, systemd containers, podman and k8s This forced docker to commoditise it’s tech or docker was slowly boiled into commoditised component Signed arm chair warrior
  - not_real_acct 7y ago
    > Exactly a good model is puppet labs. They have a enterprise version and a go to consultancy They seem to be surviving. I hope in this age of the cloud Their CEO stepped down three years ago: https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2016/09/luke_kanies_founder_of_portlan.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2016/09/luke_kanie... The new CEO has ONE expertise, which is winding down bankrupt tech companies: http://thedronegirl.com/2018/09/14/airware-closing/ http://thedronegirl.com/2018/09/14/airware-closing/

brown9-2 7y ago

The problem is that Docker engine alone is not much of a project, you need something higher level to control which containers run on which machines.

nullwasamistake 7y ago

I agree it's a mess. We have docker swarm, docker compose, "regular" docker, the Moby fiasco. I'm just waiting for Enterprise Docker Faces to surface at this point. Kubernetes isn't that great but it's less of a disaster than the current docker ecosystem. I'm convinced another player will come in taking the best of both and give us something reasonable to work with. Maybe in 5 years or so... Istio looks promising. The missing piece has always been convenient inter-container communication. I think something with mesh and gRPC baked into the core for strong service contracts would blow everyone else away.

rodgerd 7y ago

> Has there ever been a bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker managed to preside over? Digital had VMS, and lost slowly in the marketplace until they lost Dave Cutler to Microsoft, then VMS started collapsing. Cutler showed what he could achieve with decent backing and a company not wedded to selling expensive proprietary hardware. Digital had the Alpha processor. Digital had the StrongARM processor, the fastest commodity ARM chip on the market, and sold it to Intel because what future did ARM have anyway? Digital had AltaVista. There's plenty more, but those are some highlights.

dfrage 7y ago
Xerox and the personal computer at the level of what became engineering workstations. The book Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer covers this fairly well as I remember.

CamouflagedKiwi 7y ago

That wasn't a likely outcome; containers are too critical to platforms like Kubernetes for those platforms to allow them to be locked up by a company with an enterprise subscription. Also they aren't hard enough for that to work; there's lots of experts out there around namespaces that would write an alternative container runtime before getting locked in that way. The elephant in the room for Docker is that there's not an effective way to monetise it - Docker Hub subscriptions clearly aren't going to cut it for a company with lots of investment and hundreds of employees.

bsaul 7y ago
In retrospect they should have partenered with a company like digitalocean to create a docker cloud platform.
- nickstinemates 7y ago
  My job was to create these opportunities and they were there - internal politics prohibited them from getting done. Prior to all of the Docker as a Service endpoints getting launched, there was an internal pitch for a Docker as a Service program aimed at all of the cloud vendors as part of a Docker ubiquity/available everywhere strategy. The push back internally was that we should create these integrations and sell them to the cloud vendors. That was never going to work, but, about 3 years past the mark we started talking publicly about 'Docker Editions.' A little late to the party by then..

sagichmal 7y ago

Docker never had a viable business model, this was obvious to everyone in the space since day 1.

nickstinemates 7y ago
I disagree. From the inside, there were a few obvious business models. The reality was bifurcation of effort and lack of alignment.
- sagichmal 7y ago
  From the outside, there weren’t. App Store model with Docker Hub was never going anywhere without an entrenched platform, which you couldn’t possibly build because you didn’t have the talent (no offense at all here, the market was and is insane) and even if you had, there was too much competition from other players. Licensing wasn’t feasible, not enough value-add, and too many viable alternatives waiting in the wings for you to overplay that hand. And any secondary market that showed promise was already swarming with other companies “integrating” with Docker and making their own value props. What alternatives were there? I never saw one.

windexh8er 7y ago

> The whole pitch towards legacy apps was also short termist distraction when investment dollars are all going to cloud native solutions. Legacy apps are a big business case but getting companies to invest in their legacy estate is still a tough ask. Don't even get me started. Leadership wanted Docker to sell "MTA" (Migrate Traditional Apps) and Docker probably spent a few million to the middleware folks sitting in a room developing "archetypes" instead of TCO to position with the customer as output of the time and money containerizing those apps would save. Instead the push from sales leadership was "sell them on the value". What value? We couldn't prove we were providing any unless we did the containerization. And in the case where we could get services to handle a few freebies they were always the easy ones that didn't truly show anything. It was and is a horrible miss. I'm not sure if that's what they're still focused on but it didn't resonate with customers or prospects. Right before I left Docker was moving into positioning Docker Enterprise for Desktop. They had ridiculously high limits on seat sales and we're going to charge ridiculous premiums per seat. Clearly nobody in leadership realized that the UI provided to bootstrap some simple framework wasn't worth that. But nope... So many wasted resources on products that add no value.