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I originally came here to ask how folks use that many docker images in six hours (I'm mostly a Docker n00b, and not being facetious); however, after reading the

I originally came here to ask how folks use that many docker images in six hours (I'm mostly a Docker n00b, and not being facetious); however, after reading the article, I clicked to see how much unlimited is and it's $5 a month. Now my question has changed to: is $5 a month really a deal breaker for folks to get unlimited? Or what are the use cases where the cost is prohibitive? Open source or community projects? In most cases it would seem $5/user isn't much as a business or organizational expense, and if it's a personal project 200 images in six hours seems pretty solid? I'm just sort of shocked it's so cheap. I figured it'd be like $25-$100 a month or something just because of all the bandwidth someone could probably burn building random/broken shit over and over. I'm mostly curious because I've considered using Docker recently for personal projects and my home server; but I'd rather not invest a bunch of time porting things only to find out it's gonna be way more than $5 (not including my time). Or is it that hard to just build your own images? To be honest, I've never really understood that part of Docker (using other folks images)... It always seemed like an enormous security risk[1]. FWIW, I still deploy my personal projects using chef/ansible, shell scripts, and systemd units like some sort of curmudgeon-y monster... [1] Everything is a security risk (APT, source, etc), I know, I get it. No one need scribe miles of pedantry into the comments explaining it to me. It's what each of us has tolerance for and can accept that matters.

klodolph 6y ago
I don’t think anyone who’s adopted systemd can call themselves a curmudgeon :)
- msla 6y ago
  Sometimes, curmudgeonliness is measured in resistance to changing the default: "Stock CentOS was good enough before and it's good enough now!"
temikus 6y ago
It may be general resistance to a concept. More and more services are becoming subscription based, so 5$ here, 5$ there and the cost creeps further.
- mm89 6y ago
  Exactly. It's hard enough to save money as it is. News websites blow my mind with this - if I forked over $5 to every news outlet I occasionally like to read, I'd be spending at least $500 maybe more per year JUST to get access to some random person's biased recant of what's happening in the world. If there were a news source that did the opposite of this, and basically provided a bullet list of objective, non-biased events boiled down to exactly what I need to know, that might be something I'd pay for. Hell, it would save you time over filtering the opinionated BS out.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Mind blowing, imagine paying $5 for each newspaper one wants to read.
    - ironmagma 6y ago
      Except it’s not $5, it’s $5 to sign up, then an email and a phone call and your firstborn dog to unsubscribe. If it were microtransactions, that’d be one thing...
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        If the service doesn't play ball there is always the consumer protection agency.
        prepend 6y ago
        That doesn’t work. I find it better to stay anonymous and avoid spam from these services. The perpetual spam is worse for me than the $5.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      You’re missing the point. If there’s a news source that you occasionally read then it’s far more cost effective for you to just buy the paper at the stand for 50¢ the few times you want it. Same with magazines. If you read every newspaper then getting lower cost and delivery in return for the paper getting consistent revenue is a good deal for both parties. If you get your news like most people, via link aggregators like HN, Reddit Facebook, Twitter then you get linked to dozens of publications that all want a $5/mo. commitment which is untenable.
ViViDboarder 6y ago
It’s not common to need that many pulls nor is it hard to build your own images. If you’re deploying to a cluster with 200 machines, you could easily hit this if you use the public registry though. However, if you’re managing that size cluster you can probably afford the fee, but more importantly, you should probably pull once to a local registry and use that to deploy to your cluster anyway.
- hamiltont 6y ago
  Do you run a local registry? Any high-quality articles/youtube talks to share? I'm about to set one up for our own little cluster (~5 machines, ~75 containers). I know tons about docker engine, and a fair bit about the registry, but it's always nice to watch a "lessons learned from actually doing this in production" talk to know what mistakes to avoid
  - sytse 6y ago
    If you want to run a local registry to stay below the 100 pulls per 6 hours limit please consider GitLab. The Dependency Proxy https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/dependency_proxy/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/dependency_proxy/ will cache docker images. This way you stay within the limits Docker set and subsequent pulls should be faster as well.
  - oppositelock 6y ago
    I run tens of thousands of docker images in production, or rather, tens of thousands of copies of a few hundred images. If you do something like this, you absolutely MUST have a local registry. Harbor [1], JFrog [2], and Quay [3] would be the first ones that I look at. Harbor is open source, free, and a member of the CNCF. You will need to do a little bit of work to set it up to scale properly. JFrog offers a SaaS registry, but you will pay big $$ based on pull traffic. Their commercial site license is about $3k/year. Quay is older than either of them, stable, and high quality. I'd start with Harbor these days. [1] https://goharbor.io/ https://goharbor.io/ [2] https://www.jfrog.com/confluence/display/JFROG/JFrog+Artifactory https://www.jfrog.com/confluence/display/JFROG/JFrog+Artifac... [3] https://quay.io/ https://quay.io/
msla 6y ago
$5/month isn't $5/month. It's convincing your boss you need $5/month, because they need to convince their boss, which eventually makes its way up the chain to C-levels, who don't know Docker from yesterday's rotting tuna casserole and view eating either that or the $5/month with the same level of disdain. It isn't about the money, it's about the Mommy-May-I up and down the chain with emails and meetings and careful explanations to skeptical glares. It's a psychological and institutional barrier.
- cddotdotslash 6y ago
  If your C suite is personally approving a $5/month charge, your organization is likely no where near the size where a change like this from Docker impacts you.
  - muxator 6y ago
    Or maybe your organization is a public institution, where each penny spent needs to be authorized/accounted for.
    - mcny 6y ago
      > It was revealed on January 22, 2009 that Thain spent $1.22 million of corporate funds in early 2008 to renovate two conference rooms, a reception area, and his office, spending $131,000 for area rugs, $68,000 for an antique credenza, $87,000 for guest chairs, $35,115 for a gold-plated commode on legs, and $1,100 for a wastebasket. Thain subsequently apologized for his lapse in judgment, and reimbursed the company in full for the costs. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Thain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Thain "Sorry I got caught. I will work harder to hide next time."
    - protomyth 6y ago
      Even in a public institution that has never failed an audit, I have trouble believing $5/mo is a hard thing to get. Technically, its $60/year fee because its one of those annual plans. We pay for vultr with no drama.
  - 6y ago
paxys 6y ago
Anything is a deal breaker if the user expects to pay nothing. That is why going from free to $1/month will have a much larger user dropoff than, say, $1 to $10.
- overcast 6y ago
  Weber's Law. Human perception is logarithmic.
pjmlp 6y ago
It is pretty cheap, it is just the free beer crowd that is upset.
callmeal 6y ago
>Now my question has changed to: is $5 a month really a deal breaker for folks to get unlimited? I want to speed forward 5 years and see how well this ages. It reminds me of all the other comments about "of course Facebook will never require an account to use your VR headset"...
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  I think it will age fine. If every ad-supported website switched to this model, I'd be paying for either zero or one websites. If it was $5 for access that would be a completely different situation, but a big free tier followed by $5 for unlimited is fine.
coredog64 6y ago
The limit for unauthenticated users is by IP address. I could imagine a smallish business that has a consistent on-ramp IP for their users that could breach the limit not on any single user but in aggregate. I do sympathize with Docker though: Storage and bandwidth at that scale isn’t cheap and they need to monetize somehow.
tomc1985 6y ago
You should be more shocked that everything else is so expensive. The base costs for a lot of tech stuff (like bandwidth) are so cheap. But you would never know between these bullshit "what is it worth to you" pricing models and the number of middlemen trying to stick their hand into the pot. It's disgusting.
staticassertion 6y ago
Yeah, I'm just going to pay for it. I think I probably already am, but if I'm not, I will. Even the enterprise 7/user isn't that bad at all. Github enterprise is like 3x that.
corobo 6y ago
Developers are cheap. “I could build that” is your competitor Note could, not will
- Ironlikebike 6y ago
  Developers are overly optimistic, undervalue their time (they don't know the loaded-cost of their time), and overvalue their solutions (they rarely account for maintenance costs or the long-tail of time to perfect the solution). So developers think they are cheap. For example, I had an engineer express disgust that we might have to pay $4/month-per-user for gitlab just to have mirroring enabled. He said "we can do our own mirroring." When asked how long it would take he said, "between 2 hours to two-weeks if we have to iron out bugs". So when accounting for his time, his price to deliver ranged between $200-ish in the best-case scenario, to $8000-ish in the worst-case scenario (which far exceeds the cost of paying for the licenses). Needless to say, we paid for the licenses. He also wasn't considering the opportunity-cost, i.e., what will he NOT do that's more valuable while he works on this proposed solution that we could just pay for?

klodolph 6y ago

I don’t think anyone who’s adopted systemd can call themselves a curmudgeon :)

msla 6y ago
Sometimes, curmudgeonliness is measured in resistance to changing the default: "Stock CentOS was good enough before and it's good enough now!"

temikus 6y ago

It may be general resistance to a concept. More and more services are becoming subscription based, so 5$ here, 5$ there and the cost creeps further.

mm89 6y ago
Exactly. It's hard enough to save money as it is. News websites blow my mind with this - if I forked over $5 to every news outlet I occasionally like to read, I'd be spending at least $500 maybe more per year JUST to get access to some random person's biased recant of what's happening in the world. If there were a news source that did the opposite of this, and basically provided a bullet list of objective, non-biased events boiled down to exactly what I need to know, that might be something I'd pay for. Hell, it would save you time over filtering the opinionated BS out.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Mind blowing, imagine paying $5 for each newspaper one wants to read.
  - ironmagma 6y ago
    Except it’s not $5, it’s $5 to sign up, then an email and a phone call and your firstborn dog to unsubscribe. If it were microtransactions, that’d be one thing...
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      If the service doesn't play ball there is always the consumer protection agency.
      - prepend 6y ago
        That doesn’t work. I find it better to stay anonymous and avoid spam from these services. The perpetual spam is worse for me than the $5.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    You’re missing the point. If there’s a news source that you occasionally read then it’s far more cost effective for you to just buy the paper at the stand for 50¢ the few times you want it. Same with magazines. If you read every newspaper then getting lower cost and delivery in return for the paper getting consistent revenue is a good deal for both parties. If you get your news like most people, via link aggregators like HN, Reddit Facebook, Twitter then you get linked to dozens of publications that all want a $5/mo. commitment which is untenable.

ViViDboarder 6y ago

It’s not common to need that many pulls nor is it hard to build your own images. If you’re deploying to a cluster with 200 machines, you could easily hit this if you use the public registry though. However, if you’re managing that size cluster you can probably afford the fee, but more importantly, you should probably pull once to a local registry and use that to deploy to your cluster anyway.

hamiltont 6y ago
Do you run a local registry? Any high-quality articles/youtube talks to share? I'm about to set one up for our own little cluster (~5 machines, ~75 containers). I know tons about docker engine, and a fair bit about the registry, but it's always nice to watch a "lessons learned from actually doing this in production" talk to know what mistakes to avoid
- sytse 6y ago
  If you want to run a local registry to stay below the 100 pulls per 6 hours limit please consider GitLab. The Dependency Proxy https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/dependency_proxy/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/dependency_proxy/ will cache docker images. This way you stay within the limits Docker set and subsequent pulls should be faster as well.
- oppositelock 6y ago
  I run tens of thousands of docker images in production, or rather, tens of thousands of copies of a few hundred images. If you do something like this, you absolutely MUST have a local registry. Harbor [1], JFrog [2], and Quay [3] would be the first ones that I look at. Harbor is open source, free, and a member of the CNCF. You will need to do a little bit of work to set it up to scale properly. JFrog offers a SaaS registry, but you will pay big $$ based on pull traffic. Their commercial site license is about $3k/year. Quay is older than either of them, stable, and high quality. I'd start with Harbor these days. [1] https://goharbor.io/ https://goharbor.io/ [2] https://www.jfrog.com/confluence/display/JFROG/JFrog+Artifactory https://www.jfrog.com/confluence/display/JFROG/JFrog+Artifac... [3] https://quay.io/ https://quay.io/

msla 6y ago

$5/month isn't $5/month. It's convincing your boss you need $5/month, because they need to convince their boss, which eventually makes its way up the chain to C-levels, who don't know Docker from yesterday's rotting tuna casserole and view eating either that or the $5/month with the same level of disdain. It isn't about the money, it's about the Mommy-May-I up and down the chain with emails and meetings and careful explanations to skeptical glares. It's a psychological and institutional barrier.

cddotdotslash 6y ago
If your C suite is personally approving a $5/month charge, your organization is likely no where near the size where a change like this from Docker impacts you.
- muxator 6y ago
  Or maybe your organization is a public institution, where each penny spent needs to be authorized/accounted for.
  - mcny 6y ago
    > It was revealed on January 22, 2009 that Thain spent $1.22 million of corporate funds in early 2008 to renovate two conference rooms, a reception area, and his office, spending $131,000 for area rugs, $68,000 for an antique credenza, $87,000 for guest chairs, $35,115 for a gold-plated commode on legs, and $1,100 for a wastebasket. Thain subsequently apologized for his lapse in judgment, and reimbursed the company in full for the costs. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Thain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Thain "Sorry I got caught. I will work harder to hide next time."
  - protomyth 6y ago
    Even in a public institution that has never failed an audit, I have trouble believing $5/mo is a hard thing to get. Technically, its $60/year fee because its one of those annual plans. We pay for vultr with no drama.
- 6y ago

paxys 6y ago

Anything is a deal breaker if the user expects to pay nothing. That is why going from free to $1/month will have a much larger user dropoff than, say, $1 to $10.

overcast 6y ago
Weber's Law. Human perception is logarithmic.

pjmlp 6y ago

It is pretty cheap, it is just the free beer crowd that is upset.

callmeal 6y ago

>Now my question has changed to: is $5 a month really a deal breaker for folks to get unlimited? I want to speed forward 5 years and see how well this ages. It reminds me of all the other comments about "of course Facebook will never require an account to use your VR headset"...

Dylan16807 6y ago
I think it will age fine. If every ad-supported website switched to this model, I'd be paying for either zero or one websites. If it was $5 for access that would be a completely different situation, but a big free tier followed by $5 for unlimited is fine.

coredog64 6y ago

The limit for unauthenticated users is by IP address. I could imagine a smallish business that has a consistent on-ramp IP for their users that could breach the limit not on any single user but in aggregate. I do sympathize with Docker though: Storage and bandwidth at that scale isn’t cheap and they need to monetize somehow.

tomc1985 6y ago

You should be more shocked that everything else is so expensive. The base costs for a lot of tech stuff (like bandwidth) are so cheap. But you would never know between these bullshit "what is it worth to you" pricing models and the number of middlemen trying to stick their hand into the pot. It's disgusting.

staticassertion 6y ago

Yeah, I'm just going to pay for it. I think I probably already am, but if I'm not, I will. Even the enterprise 7/user isn't that bad at all. Github enterprise is like 3x that.

corobo 6y ago

Developers are cheap. “I could build that” is your competitor Note could, not will

Ironlikebike 6y ago
Developers are overly optimistic, undervalue their time (they don't know the loaded-cost of their time), and overvalue their solutions (they rarely account for maintenance costs or the long-tail of time to perfect the solution). So developers think they are cheap. For example, I had an engineer express disgust that we might have to pay $4/month-per-user for gitlab just to have mirroring enabled. He said "we can do our own mirroring." When asked how long it would take he said, "between 2 hours to two-weeks if we have to iron out bugs". So when accounting for his time, his price to deliver ranged between $200-ish in the best-case scenario, to $8000-ish in the worst-case scenario (which far exceeds the cost of paying for the licenses). Needless to say, we paid for the licenses. He also wasn't considering the opportunity-cost, i.e., what will he NOT do that's more valuable while he works on this proposed solution that we could just pay for?