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It seems like dockerhub requires a lot of bandwidth...lots of people being able to pull gigabytes worth of images everyday. Does anyone know anything behind the

It seems like dockerhub requires a lot of bandwidth...lots of people being able to pull gigabytes worth of images everyday. Does anyone know anything behind the economics behind this? How can they offer it for free?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ptomato 7y ago
Likely the traditional model of taking a large amount of VC money, putting it in a pile, and then setting it on fire and waiting until they stop adding more, at which point the company ends.
rtempaccount1 7y ago
yeah there's a variety of "free at point of use" services driving the Internet and, sooner or later it seems likely there will need to be a change in how they're funded. It's not just Docker hub, there's services like the various Programming language package repos (npm, rubygems etc) and the Linux distro package repos. I would have had Github in that category, but now it's owned by MS, presumably they don't have many of that kind of funding problems...
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Github used to be in their own colo on their own bare metal. I'm not sure if they've been pushed into Azure cloud as part of the MS acquisition, but either way Github isn't paying cloud retail ($$$) for their bandwidth, and it's likely sustainable.
  - judge2020 7y ago
    Yep. Even before the acquisition in 2016, GitHub was doing fairly well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13218842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13218842
meritt 7y ago
> Does anyone know anything behind the economics behind this? You use VC money and run at a loss while focusing on marketing and tech evangelism, getting more and more startups and hopefully established companies using your software. As the cracks begin to show those growing organizations have too much tied to your system and they can't afford outages and need to scale. So they pay you for the Enterprise version of your software where you actually fix all of flaws present in the community version. Look at MongoDB if you need a good case study. It was incredibly hyped from about 2009-2015, people would defend it in heated online arguments, and today it's rarely considered for greenfield projects. But they're making about $100M/qtr selling subscriptions to Enterprise & Atlas servicing the technical debt established during that hype cycle.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ptomato 7y ago

Likely the traditional model of taking a large amount of VC money, putting it in a pile, and then setting it on fire and waiting until they stop adding more, at which point the company ends.

rtempaccount1 7y ago

yeah there's a variety of "free at point of use" services driving the Internet and, sooner or later it seems likely there will need to be a change in how they're funded. It's not just Docker hub, there's services like the various Programming language package repos (npm, rubygems etc) and the Linux distro package repos. I would have had Github in that category, but now it's owned by MS, presumably they don't have many of that kind of funding problems...

toomuchtodo 7y ago
Github used to be in their own colo on their own bare metal. I'm not sure if they've been pushed into Azure cloud as part of the MS acquisition, but either way Github isn't paying cloud retail ($$$) for their bandwidth, and it's likely sustainable.
- judge2020 7y ago
  Yep. Even before the acquisition in 2016, GitHub was doing fairly well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13218842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13218842

meritt 7y ago

> Does anyone know anything behind the economics behind this? You use VC money and run at a loss while focusing on marketing and tech evangelism, getting more and more startups and hopefully established companies using your software. As the cracks begin to show those growing organizations have too much tied to your system and they can't afford outages and need to scale. So they pay you for the Enterprise version of your software where you actually fix all of flaws present in the community version. Look at MongoDB if you need a good case study. It was incredibly hyped from about 2009-2015, people would defend it in heated online arguments, and today it's rarely considered for greenfield projects. But they're making about $100M/qtr selling subscriptions to Enterprise & Atlas servicing the technical debt established during that hype cycle.