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This seems incredibly likely to break development use cases at both extremes: CI/CD systems and developers just starting out could end up pulling quite a few im

This seems incredibly likely to break development use cases at both extremes: CI/CD systems and developers just starting out could end up pulling quite a few images per hour. Imagine if NPM, Ruby Gems, and so on rate limited package downloads until you paid! I'm not sure if there's a better way to monetize the Docker Hub, but this seems so hostile to adoption.

brian_herman__ 6y ago
Yeah, someone should come up with an alternative that mirrors it or something.
- mirekrusin 6y ago
  Built in torrent and/or ipfs?
  - namibj 6y ago
    The latter has content-dependent chunking support. That would allow for cross-image sharing of common data (large binaries, etc.).
sitkack 6y ago
> Imagine if NPM, Ruby Gems, and so on rate limited package downloads until you paid! Sounds like an entirely reasonable thing to start imagining. Reliability, safety, determinism and predictability are not thrust upon someone from the commons. I frankly find it someone atrocious and abusive that downstream systems do not adequately cache these assets. The main archive repositories should be the source of truth, but they also don't need to be the fountain.
- AaronFriel 6y ago
  Do you think NPM, Ruby Gems, or others would last long if they were so user hostile? Would Node have grown into the genuinely useful development environment it is if free users were limited to 10000 package downloads an hour? It's so unbelievably user hostile that it seems like the result will be people just stop using Docker. The right solution for Docker is probably to spin off or monetize the Hub in a different way. Imagine if GitHub started charging users for git cloning too many packfiles per hour.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    All these things cost money to run why would it be surprising if they cost money to utilize their resources beyond a point?
    - AaronFriel 6y ago
      You can either monetize the thing that brings you business directly, adversarially impacting users. Or you can monetize something else that's correlated to those costs to subsidize the main use case and keep new user acquisition frictionless. Like NPM charging large businesses with special needs with NPM Enterprise, or GitHub with teams and CI/CD features and GitHub Enterprise, and so on. Docker sold off Docker Enterprise. Now they're trying to extract rents from people who are just trying to "docker build", a command whose ease of use is what drove people to use Docker in the first place. Foot, meet gun. Docker is breaking their main selling point. "docker build" and "docker run" should _just work_. By breaking that expectation in subtle ways they risk alienating users. By advertising that they're willing to break their main use case, they're going to alienate businesses and early adopter developers like myself. Now I'm looking for alternative registries and making sure that devops code I manage doesn't depend on Docker. That's surely not what they wanted, right?
      - michaelmrose 6y ago
        Forgive my unfamiliarity. From the article >We’ve been getting questions from customers and the community regarding container image layers. We are not counting image layers as part of the pull rate limits. Because we are limiting on manifest requests, > For example, roughly 30% of all downloads on Hub come from only 1% of our anonymous users. The limits appear to be 100 pulls per 6 hour time frame per ip address for anon users and twice as much for authenticated users. The least favorable reading of this is to assume a rolling period so lets roll with that. Pun intended. According to docker whom I imagine is in a better position to evaluate the situation this will impact almost no users. Logically properly caching downloads seems like it would improve local performance. Do you really need, given the possibility to cache downloads, to pull a new image every 1.8 minutes in environments where paying $5 a month for individuals or $25 a month for a team would be prohibitive? I'm going to assume that orgs manage a variety of one off and recurring expenses. I don't see how this is any different. What I think is the most salient point is that docker is not a new endeavor. They already have many users. Acquiring new people who consume resources and pay nothing isn't a valuable proposition for them. Why would it be? Do you wish you had more roommates living with you eating your food and paying nothing towards the rent?
michaelmrose 6y ago
Presumably companies that pay 5-6 figure salaries to devs can probably pay those devs to set up caching or pay docker for the privilege of not bothering. The team pro plan with no limits starts at $25 a month for 5 users.
tinco 6y ago
$5 per month for when you pull so many images it's basically abuse is user hostile? No developer starting out is going to hit 200 images in 6 hours, and even if the did, they would go "heh" and then either take a break or pony up the 5$. 5$! It's way too little money for those limits, there should be brackets all the way up to 5000$ per month. Same for Rubygems and NPM. It's ridiculous that those are struggling organizations that can barely afford to have professionals work on them, when they're absolutely essential to whole industries. I wish they would force us to pay them.

brian_herman__ 6y ago

Yeah, someone should come up with an alternative that mirrors it or something.

mirekrusin 6y ago
Built in torrent and/or ipfs?
- namibj 6y ago
  The latter has content-dependent chunking support. That would allow for cross-image sharing of common data (large binaries, etc.).

sitkack 6y ago

> Imagine if NPM, Ruby Gems, and so on rate limited package downloads until you paid! Sounds like an entirely reasonable thing to start imagining. Reliability, safety, determinism and predictability are not thrust upon someone from the commons. I frankly find it someone atrocious and abusive that downstream systems do not adequately cache these assets. The main archive repositories should be the source of truth, but they also don't need to be the fountain.

AaronFriel 6y ago
Do you think NPM, Ruby Gems, or others would last long if they were so user hostile? Would Node have grown into the genuinely useful development environment it is if free users were limited to 10000 package downloads an hour? It's so unbelievably user hostile that it seems like the result will be people just stop using Docker. The right solution for Docker is probably to spin off or monetize the Hub in a different way. Imagine if GitHub started charging users for git cloning too many packfiles per hour.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  All these things cost money to run why would it be surprising if they cost money to utilize their resources beyond a point?
  - AaronFriel 6y ago
    You can either monetize the thing that brings you business directly, adversarially impacting users. Or you can monetize something else that's correlated to those costs to subsidize the main use case and keep new user acquisition frictionless. Like NPM charging large businesses with special needs with NPM Enterprise, or GitHub with teams and CI/CD features and GitHub Enterprise, and so on. Docker sold off Docker Enterprise. Now they're trying to extract rents from people who are just trying to "docker build", a command whose ease of use is what drove people to use Docker in the first place. Foot, meet gun. Docker is breaking their main selling point. "docker build" and "docker run" should _just work_. By breaking that expectation in subtle ways they risk alienating users. By advertising that they're willing to break their main use case, they're going to alienate businesses and early adopter developers like myself. Now I'm looking for alternative registries and making sure that devops code I manage doesn't depend on Docker. That's surely not what they wanted, right?
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      Forgive my unfamiliarity. From the article >We’ve been getting questions from customers and the community regarding container image layers. We are not counting image layers as part of the pull rate limits. Because we are limiting on manifest requests, > For example, roughly 30% of all downloads on Hub come from only 1% of our anonymous users. The limits appear to be 100 pulls per 6 hour time frame per ip address for anon users and twice as much for authenticated users. The least favorable reading of this is to assume a rolling period so lets roll with that. Pun intended. According to docker whom I imagine is in a better position to evaluate the situation this will impact almost no users. Logically properly caching downloads seems like it would improve local performance. Do you really need, given the possibility to cache downloads, to pull a new image every 1.8 minutes in environments where paying $5 a month for individuals or $25 a month for a team would be prohibitive? I'm going to assume that orgs manage a variety of one off and recurring expenses. I don't see how this is any different. What I think is the most salient point is that docker is not a new endeavor. They already have many users. Acquiring new people who consume resources and pay nothing isn't a valuable proposition for them. Why would it be? Do you wish you had more roommates living with you eating your food and paying nothing towards the rent?

michaelmrose 6y ago

Presumably companies that pay 5-6 figure salaries to devs can probably pay those devs to set up caching or pay docker for the privilege of not bothering. The team pro plan with no limits starts at $25 a month for 5 users.

tinco 6y ago

$5 per month for when you pull so many images it's basically abuse is user hostile? No developer starting out is going to hit 200 images in 6 hours, and even if the did, they would go "heh" and then either take a break or pony up the 5$. 5$! It's way too little money for those limits, there should be brackets all the way up to 5000$ per month. Same for Rubygems and NPM. It's ridiculous that those are struggling organizations that can barely afford to have professionals work on them, when they're absolutely essential to whole industries. I wish they would force us to pay them.