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I kinda wonder if Docker as a company is struggling. Redhat made Podman which is a compatible replacement, Then there's swarm but apparently that's not recommen

by Keverw 6y ago

I kinda wonder if Docker as a company is struggling. Redhat made Podman which is a compatible replacement, Then there's swarm but apparently that's not recommended and actively developed anymore, then as far as I know they sold off their enterprise clustering product. Seems Kubernetes is the popular thing now even if a bit complex to setup. Wonder what the current business model? Pretty neat idea of using containers, but seems they put it out in the wild, got popular and sorta lost control with so many competing options being released.

zapita 6y ago
Yes Docker seems to be struggling as a company. But I doubt Podman has anything to do with it. The adoption of Docker open-source tools is massive and 99% of its users have never heard of podman or any other clones, and likely never will. The problem is simply that those tools are free, and Docker has failed to convert the success of their free tools into a successful business.
- hda111 6y ago
  It’s partly open source and partly freeware. They could just make docker for windows/mac a paid software. I would pay for it if they would listen more to the community when a bug is found. They seem to ignore many bugs Docker Desktop on GitHub. I like about the podman Tools that there is a community effort from Red Hat. It’s not 100% compatible with docker and probably never will. So I will just hope that Microsoft or Canonical buys Docker and make it more open to the Community.
pm90 6y ago
They won the container war but lost the orchestration war. Even if docker compose was successful though, I fail to see how the clouds wouldn’t just replicate everything. So I guess they just failed to monetize the technology.
- zapita 6y ago
  > So I guess they just failed to monetize the technology. Yes, it's really that simple. All those "container wars" and "orchestration wars" are a distraction from the core issue, which is that all those container and orchestration tools are open-source, and it's very hard to build a viable business on top of them. Docker tried and failed, like most startups involved.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Anyone that wants to make money with developer tools with the free beer generation, can only focus on enterprise customers, while adopting the traditional sales models. Even here, when commercial projects are show, there is always an endless thread of free beer open source alternatives.
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young_unixer 6y ago
> Redhat made Podman which is a compatible replacement I would actually prefer if they made an incompatible replacement. Docker's CLI is pretty bad in my opinion. I want to use Docker the same way I use a headless virtual machine running an SSH server. I want starting/exiting containers to be independent from their 'main process'. I want to attach/detach whenever I need to and execute arbitrary processes. -- Just use /bin/bash as the main process This seems to be the workaround, but I always have problems with containers exiting when I don't want them to and it's just harder than what it needs to be. I've spent a total of like 6 hours learning Docker and I still don't know exactly how to achieve this simple workflow without my containers quitting on me or attach/detach issues. With VirtualBox I can do this easily. Am I too stupid to use Docker? -- Then just use VirtualBox That's what I do, but I would like not to have the overhead of a vm.
- krferriter 6y ago
  They made podman as a fully compatible replacement so people could easily drop-in replace their use of docker with podman, which worked. To handle spurious interrupts from /bin/bash you can put a small script as the entrypoint containing a while true loop with a sleep infinity in it.
- IceWreck 6y ago
  have you looked at toolbox? Its by Red Hat and works with podman under the hood
- sjy 6y ago
  > I want to use Docker the same way I use a headless virtual machine running an SSH server. I want starting/exiting containers to be independent from their 'main process'. If you’re running systemd anyway, check out systemd-nspawn. Your ssh command becomes `machinectl shell user@container`. It’s a more VM-like way of managing containers, without Docker’s image distribution features or philosophy that containers should be ephemeral.
- cpuguy83 6y ago
  There is a key sequence for detaching from the container... default is ctrl-p+q. But if you want to not deal with attach/detach, perhaps `docker exec` is what you want. It doesn't affect the main process (unless of course your command you run kills the main process).
viraptor 6y ago
> Podman which is a compatible replacement, Kinda... It doesn't support caching layers for example which makes it very different in practice.
- hda111 6y ago
  It’s still amazing that there is an alternative. It must be tedious to copy such a bad CLI design over to podman. LXD CLI is far superior.
marcosdumay 6y ago
Isn't everybody struggling right now? Except for Zoom, of course.
paxys 6y ago
After Docker Swarm failed it was clear that they could not survive just on the core Docker tech and CLI, which are all becoming less valuable day by day due to the various open container initiatives. In the absence of a killer product they are still a ripe acquisition target, but not a successful business.

by Keverw 6y ago

zapita 6y ago

Yes Docker seems to be struggling as a company. But I doubt Podman has anything to do with it. The adoption of Docker open-source tools is massive and 99% of its users have never heard of podman or any other clones, and likely never will. The problem is simply that those tools are free, and Docker has failed to convert the success of their free tools into a successful business.

hda111 6y ago
It’s partly open source and partly freeware. They could just make docker for windows/mac a paid software. I would pay for it if they would listen more to the community when a bug is found. They seem to ignore many bugs Docker Desktop on GitHub. I like about the podman Tools that there is a community effort from Red Hat. It’s not 100% compatible with docker and probably never will. So I will just hope that Microsoft or Canonical buys Docker and make it more open to the Community.

pm90 6y ago

They won the container war but lost the orchestration war. Even if docker compose was successful though, I fail to see how the clouds wouldn’t just replicate everything. So I guess they just failed to monetize the technology.

zapita 6y ago
> So I guess they just failed to monetize the technology. Yes, it's really that simple. All those "container wars" and "orchestration wars" are a distraction from the core issue, which is that all those container and orchestration tools are open-source, and it's very hard to build a viable business on top of them. Docker tried and failed, like most startups involved.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Anyone that wants to make money with developer tools with the free beer generation, can only focus on enterprise customers, while adopting the traditional sales models. Even here, when commercial projects are show, there is always an endless thread of free beer open source alternatives.

deleted 6y ago

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deleted 6y ago

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young_unixer 6y ago

> Redhat made Podman which is a compatible replacement I would actually prefer if they made an incompatible replacement. Docker's CLI is pretty bad in my opinion. I want to use Docker the same way I use a headless virtual machine running an SSH server. I want starting/exiting containers to be independent from their 'main process'. I want to attach/detach whenever I need to and execute arbitrary processes. -- Just use /bin/bash as the main process This seems to be the workaround, but I always have problems with containers exiting when I don't want them to and it's just harder than what it needs to be. I've spent a total of like 6 hours learning Docker and I still don't know exactly how to achieve this simple workflow without my containers quitting on me or attach/detach issues. With VirtualBox I can do this easily. Am I too stupid to use Docker? -- Then just use VirtualBox That's what I do, but I would like not to have the overhead of a vm.

krferriter 6y ago
They made podman as a fully compatible replacement so people could easily drop-in replace their use of docker with podman, which worked. To handle spurious interrupts from /bin/bash you can put a small script as the entrypoint containing a while true loop with a sleep infinity in it.
IceWreck 6y ago
have you looked at toolbox? Its by Red Hat and works with podman under the hood
sjy 6y ago
> I want to use Docker the same way I use a headless virtual machine running an SSH server. I want starting/exiting containers to be independent from their 'main process'. If you’re running systemd anyway, check out systemd-nspawn. Your ssh command becomes `machinectl shell user@container`. It’s a more VM-like way of managing containers, without Docker’s image distribution features or philosophy that containers should be ephemeral.
cpuguy83 6y ago
There is a key sequence for detaching from the container... default is ctrl-p+q. But if you want to not deal with attach/detach, perhaps `docker exec` is what you want. It doesn't affect the main process (unless of course your command you run kills the main process).

viraptor 6y ago

> Podman which is a compatible replacement, Kinda... It doesn't support caching layers for example which makes it very different in practice.

hda111 6y ago
It’s still amazing that there is an alternative. It must be tedious to copy such a bad CLI design over to podman. LXD CLI is far superior.

marcosdumay 6y ago

Isn't everybody struggling right now? Except for Zoom, of course.

paxys 6y ago

After Docker Swarm failed it was clear that they could not survive just on the core Docker tech and CLI, which are all becoming less valuable day by day due to the various open container initiatives. In the absence of a killer product they are still a ripe acquisition target, but not a successful business.