Dev-tooling. I would have expected them to come up with something like https://www.testcontainers.org/ https://www.testcontainers.org/ and sell enterprise/commu

Dev-tooling. I would have expected them to come up with something like https://www.testcontainers.org/ https://www.testcontainers.org/ and sell enterprise/community licenses, just like they do with their cross platform clients. Enterprises need support, and by creating a rich suite of products that become essential to developers, they could have maybe really stuck (hard to predict what could happen). Instead they tried really hard to make docker swarm a thing while kubernetes started taking off. To be sure, at the time, it wasn't clear which platform would succeed, and I remember that a certain OpenStack project tried to support both (like all OpenStack projects that try to be everything to everyone). Kubernetes has a lot of concepts that need to be learned, so the barrier to entry was much higher, and docker swarm seemed more straightforward. All devs loved docker right away but in the early days I remember there being a lot of blogs about NOT running containers in production because of all the security issues. Kubernetes made that problem go away. It got adoption by different cloud providers which made it easy to deploy/use on their platform. That was maybe a tell: if devs loved docker so much and kubernetes was the tool that cloud providers supported, they could have focused on the former.