20 ms·

Docker Raises $23M

299 points by nickjj 6y ago

alexellisuk 6y ago
Interesting to see this called a Series B. Did Docker hit reset after the split? Here's a separate thread for "Docker Series B: More Fuel To Help Dev Teams Get Ship Done" - with a bit more info on what the plan is from Scott. Interesting to see this news on the same day that "We don't need Docker" was also on the front page of Hacker News. I think we absolutely still need Docker in 2021. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26478669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26478669
- libria 6y ago
  > "We don't need Docker" was also on the front page of Hacker News. I read it as a typical "We don't need [Complex Tool] because we don't have [Complex Tool Solutions] problems". Not trivializing it, I think those articles are valuable hype-free analysis of the latest tool-of-the-day. "They don't need Docker" and "We absolutely need Docker" are non-contradictory.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    There's also, though, things like K8S not using Docker, podman becoming popular, etc. Neither is a definitive nail, but it does erode Docker's moat a bit.
    - zapita 6y ago
      K8S uses containerd which is the official Docker runtime.
      - mroche 6y ago
        The difference being that Google has deprecated the shimming to Docker they had been doing with the “Docker” runtime to access containerd, so now it will go straight to the source by default. Red Hat OpenShift also switched from using Docker as its runtime with OpenShift 4 in 2019, though it was in favor of CRI-O rather than containerd.
        zapita 6y ago
        All accurate. My point is that Kub deprecating the shimming does not affect Docker’s popularly or market share either way. The existence of the shim was an implementation detail and Docker themselves have been encouraging the switch to containerd. They clearly want the Docker brand to be attached to developer-facing tools instead of a hidden piece of increasingly commoditized infrastructure. If a critical mass of kubernetes deployments switched from containerd to cri-o, that would be more problematic for Docker, but that seems unlikely to happen. Openshift to my knowledge is the only major kubernetes distribution not based on containerd. At this stage of the adoption cycle, cri-o is unlikely to be more than a distant second to containerd.
        mroche 6y ago
        Yes, and I did not mean to diminish that context, more so expand upon the "k8s not using Docker" side of things from the parent you were responding to.
      - tyingq 6y ago
        "official Docker runtime" Yes, though not produced by Docker and does not require Docker.
  - vendiddy 6y ago
    This 100% Better to think of these titles as "When you might need Docker" and "When you might not need Docker" so you can consider the tradeoffs rather than interpret it as a blanket statement, Docker is good/bad.
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    There are two very different and kind of opposite "we don't need Docker" perspectives. One is that of the previous article— "we don't need docker because we don't need containerized environments since our tooling produces a single binary which somehow has no dependencies, configuration, or data files, so there's nothing to containerize." The other is "we don't need Docker because we use tools like buildah, img, or kaniko to build OCI containers, our devs use podman, and we run this stuff in prod on a someone else's k8s PaaS that under the hood is backed by containerd."
  - jack_riminton 6y ago
    Problem is the cargo-culting. A lot of startups don't have the complex problems Many are anticipating scaling problems they'll never have and wasting a lot of time, effort and money in that process
    - mikepurvis 6y ago
      Maybe, but it's such a balance. I'm finally getting into Kubernetes and after years of hearing how awful it was to get it going, I was shocked at how painless it was to stand up microk8s locally and sling Helm charts at it, get Jenkins generating agents on it, get metrics from it, etc. If I were deploying something to a cloud, I would absolutely do this approach with some k8s-as-a-service provider over rolling my own machine images or having to deal with remote controlling instances using something like Ansible. Yes, it would be possible to get sucked down a rabbit hole with over-emphasizing scaling, clustering, whatever upfront, but IMO these tools are now mature enough that it's a reasonable workflow even if you're just deploying a single instance of a container with one statically-linked binary in it.
  - duxup 6y ago
    A lot of those articles and posts are what I think of 'exploratory' someone doesn't want / need a thing,t hey present their way of doing things and we can all learn something from them... even if we don't do things like they do. God knows how much "don't need JavaScript" gets posted...
  - TheGRS 6y ago
    Yesterday was in a meeting discussing our build pipeline and we had this moment of introspection where we realized "wow, we do a completely containerized, micro-serviced app and it actually works really well for the most part". When Docker was very new I remember dealing with all manner of bizarre issues, mostly because the engineers just weren't used to how to use it yet. But if you have some decent idea of how to architect it then Docker is a huge boon IMO. People are also totally right to question why some new fancy tool is needed when the old way works. Its best to just view all these things as tools at your disposal rather than necessities.
- tsejerome97 6y ago
  As a 10+ years old company / YC company + significant amount of market share, I was expecting Docket to be like series D-F or even going public. Wondering if it is actually common for companies in CA to be like that...
  - kentonv 6y ago
    Looks like original Docker did Series E in 2017: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/docker/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/docker/company_finan... This is apparently "new/restructured Docker" which did Series A in 2019. From the footnote in the article: https://www.docker.com/press-release/docker-new-direction https://www.docker.com/press-release/docker-new-direction It does seem weird to just start the letters over like that, as if it's a new hot startup.
    - grey-area 6y ago
      Doing a series H might make investors think harder about why they need 8 rounds of funding over 12 years or so and still didn't manage to turn a profit.
      - kevstev 6y ago
        I had a recruiter a few years ago pitch me about an amazing opportunity at a series F company that he wouldn't name in the initial pitch email. I didn't see that as an advantage at all. That's 6 rounds of investors who are all going to need to get paid and then some before you see a penny. It also implied to me the early growth/fun stage was over and they either limping along or so big to be unrecognizable as a legit startup.
      - tsejerome97 6y ago
        That's quite interesting, let's see if it will pivot a bit for the "new" trend like going serverless
  - nonameiguess 6y ago
    I always get amused by D-Wave, the 22 year-old "startup" that is now on its 19th funding round: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/d-wave-systems/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/d-wave-systems/compa...
- anthonyskipper 6y ago
  They already did series-e and looped back around: https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/docker-series-e--a283f818 https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/docker-series-e--a2...
- boynamedsue 6y ago
  Docker recapitalized in 2019 when they sold the enterprise business to Mirantis. So, yes Docker hit the reset button and wiped out all the existing shareholders.
endisneigh 6y ago
I hope they work on Docker Swarm. “Docker compose” for multiple machines needs working on!
- dgellow 6y ago
  Didn’t they drop Swarm ~1 year ago when they sold their enterprise offering? I thought they decided to instead focus on k8s. All of this becomes so confusing.
  - polyrand 6y ago
    Now there's something called Swarm mode built directly into the main Docker engine. I think that was the "replacement" of the classic Docker Swarm.
    - brodock 6y ago
      So, who owns the "Docker Engine" ? Mirantis or Docker Inc?
      - Nullabillity 6y ago
        Mirantis
    - Nullabillity 6y ago
      That migration was way before the acquisition. The Mirantis deprecation is about Swarm Mode.
      - dgellow 6y ago
        All of this is so confusing…
- ghaff 6y ago
  I believe that Swarm and the other enterprise-oriented pieces all went to Mirantis. Docker, the company, is now specifically oriented to developers.
f430 6y ago
does docker make net profit? or is the "future" potential earnings at a crazy multiple still making sense when yields are rising and inflation is expected to rise?
meddlepal 6y ago
Im still a little surprised Microsoft hasn't bought Docker (or one of the other big compute-infra players).
- ghaff 6y ago
  Docker sold its compute infra business.
  - meddlepal 6y ago
    I wasn't suggesting they buy Docker's (former) compute-infra business but that it would be a good complimentary buy to Microsoft's or one of the other compute-infra player's businesses to own Docker since it is an additional tap into the developer market.
- wealthyyy 6y ago
  If they did, they would rename it as Microcubes.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Why bother? They have their own container management infrastructure.
  - meddlepal 6y ago
    Inbound marketing and developer mind share. Seamless integration between docker tooling and Azure etc etc.
mark_and_sweep 6y ago
At first, I wanted to read the article. But having to wait more than one minute to submit my cookie preferences, I closed the tab and left. If anyone at Docker is reading this: Please reconsider your cookie banner implementation.
- dean177 6y ago
  Trust arc is incredibly obnoxious
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    Especially as a corporate site (that is, not a click-farm that relies on tracking ads) this is unacceptable "Trust arc" I'd trust the site more if it had a sensible cookie policy
  - birktj 6y ago
    Is this kind of artificial delay even legal under the GDRP? Does anyone know if there has been any lawsuits against trust arc and co over this stuff? After waiting forever I was greeted with: "Some opt-outs failed. Opt-out requests responded with error or timeout. Please try again". How is this okay?
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      It isn’t (GDPR regulates how consent can be obtained and shenanigans like these are an obvious example of bad faith) but the entities supposed to enforce the GDPR are absolutely incompetent and don’t care.
- TLightful 6y ago
  That's some decent patience you've got there. I give websites 5 seconds, tops.
- kawsper 6y ago
  They are aware of it, I've contacted them multiple times about it, they just don't care.
paxys 6y ago
Considering how entrenched Docker has been in global tech infrastructure for so many years, I automatically assumed that the company was worth billions already, but guess not. I wonder why they haven't been bought out by Microsoft or Google, if nothing else then just for the talent.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  It is obvious. This is a common pattern: 1. Offer open-source 100% free product that's absolutely ground breaking, unlike anything else. 2. Get a shitload of users and free PR machine gets rolling. Network effects kick in. 3. Go to investors with your active user count in excess of millions. 4. Investors go bonkers and their eyes swell up with all the ways they can exploit these addicted-to-free user base. 5. Company has trouble monetizing the users. Users are pissed. 6. We all wonder why they couldn't make billions. It just happened to Elastic search a couple of months ago when Amazon swiped the rug from under them. Good. This should be a lesson to all the companies that want to follow this pattern. Without Step 1, Docker would have had a much more difficult time to get traction and would have to compete on a level ground. So, they short circuit this competition by going full 100% free product route. I have zero empathy for these companies and their investors.
  - zapita 6y ago
    Except Docker had already raised $10M before launching. So they do not match your pattern.
    - systemvoltage 6y ago
      Doesn't matter. $10M initial round to offer free product to get users aboard. The key point is to get users addicted to free. Uber did this by undercutting the entire taxi industry at a loss. Ever wondered why your rides were so cheap!? Jio did the same in India, offer free unlimited internet on their phone service and wipe out the competition.
      - 6y ago
abledon 6y ago
Thank god, someones gotta pay for the free container registry all my sideprojects depend on!
- bredren 6y ago
  Have you tried GitHub packages?
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    Yes. Someones gotta pay for the free container registry all my sideprojects depend on!
    - mvzvm 6y ago
      You are all over this thread being snarky, and commenting in what seems to be bad faith. Please stop, this is not reddit.
      - systemvoltage 6y ago
        I’m sorry if it came across this way. The snarky comment highlights pretty well that we magically expect almost without a second thought that GitHub is free. Support SourceHut and pay for hosting git if people want to break away from ostensibly free services. Or pay for Github. SourceHut is also open source.
        mvzvm 6y ago
        In what way is Github not free?
        mrkeen 6y ago
        Apologies in advance for the snark: https://github.com/pricing https://github.com/pricing
        deleted 6y ago
yuppie_scum 6y ago
Podman
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  What about podman?
neom 6y ago
Docker has Donnie Berkholz running product as of recently. I met him when he was at Redmonk and I was incredibly impressed by how sharp he is. Given they now have him as VP of Products, this cash injection is certainly more interesting as I'd expect him to do something useful with it.
jrm4 6y ago
Can't help but see this as bad for everything; to me it feels like if "curl" or "ssh" raises $23M. I would love for these people who work on these great tools to make lots of money, but what this means is that "now Docker has to figure out how to squeeze money out of this particular (admittedly good) tool in the chain" -- and the tool usually suffers.
- zapita 6y ago
  Docker was created by a VC-backed startup in 2013. So they have had an incentive to make money from the very start. At no point was Docker not financed by VC money.
  - jrm4 6y ago
    That doesn't really address anything I said? Regardless of how it got started -- it simply feels like the type of tool that doesn't fit well with a high-profit model because it is so backend/developer oriented. I've said it before, if you're trying to be profitable, that means there must be some part of it that is, "if you don't pay, you don't get it." What is that thing for Docker (a generally very open-sourcey thing), and will it be worth it?
- devmor 6y ago
  Yeah, this is abjectly terrifying to me. A signal that I need to begin looking at alternatives to Docker.
  - IceWreck 6y ago
    Docker popularized containers, but it does nothing special. Podman is the closest alternative, but a lot of engines can run images from any oci registry like docker hub. Other engines you might wanna look at: rkt, lxc with an oci template, etc. Kubernetes with cri-o runs oci containers as well.
- musicale 6y ago
  This is exactly right. Docker is like lxc/lxd with some extra stuff (much of which I personally dislike.) It's not rocket science, and podman is obviously a drop-in replacement. The ssh example is good though - so much depends on ssh, yet how much do we invest in it?
SilasX 6y ago
I'm confused -- is this a liquidity event or something (or somehow to let employees cash out options)? The release doesn't mention anything about that, and yet $23M seems like a small amount of money for Docker to have to beg the equity market for, given how small that figure is compared to their revenues: https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/docker-monitoring-market-size-2020-growth-strategies-opportunity-challenges-rising-trends-and-revenue-analysis-2027-2020-12-21 https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/docker-monitoring-...
imwillofficial 6y ago
I’m happy to see docker get a little more lifeline.
IceWreck 6y ago
Does the Docker company even do anything to stay relevant? * The popularized containers but their core tool has been replaced by superior alternatives like Podman. * They sold their enterprise registry which wouldve earned them actual money. * The consumer registry has tons of free/cheaper alternatives like github's container registry, something from gitlab and on the enterprise side, there is Red Hat's quay. * Docker Swarm is dead compared to Kubernetes.
- ColdHeat 6y ago
  I mostly agree here but I'm not really sure that Podman has replaced Docker. I'm also curious how you're determining that Podman is superior to Docker?
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    It definitely has on Red-Hat.
- m463 6y ago
  I think podman is a good start, but not there yet. Give it a year or two.
filleokus 6y ago
It feels like Docker (Inc) is becoming less and less "relevant" for each year that passes. At least from my perspective, they led the popularisation of containerisation and the whole cattle-not-pets approach of deploying apps. They created big and long lasting change in the industry. But they seem to have lost the production environment race to Kubernetes, at least for now. They are the biggest player in the dev-machine market, but more alternatives are popping up making it even harder to monetise. And containerd isn't a part of Docker (Inc) any more. They do have Docker Hub, and its privileged position as the default registry of all Docker installs. But I don't really see why paying (i.e enterprise) customers would pick Docker Hub over their friendly neighbourhood cloud provider registry where they already have contracts. Will Docker start rate limiting the public free repos even harder? Maybe making big orgs pay for the privilege of being hosted in the default docker registry? Charging to have the images "verified"? Anyways, I hope Docker find some viable business model, it would be sad to see them fail commercially after arguably succeeding in changing the (devops) world.
- feynmanzhou 6y ago
  It is no doubt that Kubernetes is popolar and powerful, even some folks believe Kubernetes is the next-gen distributed operating system. But the most challenging thing is the high learning cury for Kubernetes novice. I would recommend an open source Kubernetes platform solution for novice. https://kubesphere.io/ https://kubesphere.io/
- brian_herman 6y ago
  I want docker to succeed but I agree with you... I just love typing the docker command and the registry was great.
- mbreese 6y ago
  Is there any profit to be gained from knowing which repositories are the most active? Which get downloaded the most? I mean... you'd think there would be some "market research" type of thing that could be sold, but now that I think about it more, I'm not sure. I assume most of the repositories are either OSS that are pulled a ton, or are pulled by an individual or small team. I'm not sure what the business opportunity is from that knowledge. If there was such a market for that information, I assume they'd have already tried to exploit it...
brainzap 6y ago
And still a horrible advanced experience, the only thing the update does is change the UI.
purple_ferret 6y ago
Should have went the SPAC route
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  should have went the SPAC route Or issued Doggercoin
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
adictator 6y ago
Totally tangential: The last 3 DockerCons featured at least one hijāb glorification. Not sure what message Docker is trying to give to the world, especially when the rest of the world is fighting this oppressive practice that demeans & objectifies women! Let's see how many hijabs are used in this year's DockerCon.
supermatt 6y ago
Ive tried giving docker money MANY times, but their pre-sales support is absolutely abysmal. Maybe this will help fix that!
staunch 6y ago
I believe the reason it's "Series B" after like 10 VC raises is that Docker, Inc recapitalized and basically wiped out existing shareholders (former employees, etc). I'm surprised there's not been a stockholder lawsuit, since they could've presumably sold the company for something and returned some money to the prior stockholders.
- miohtama 6y ago
  Funding rounds overflow after Z. It is known.
trhway 6y ago
Somebody should just buy to them out of misery. Looks to be very cheap for the name recognition and some people.
revskill 6y ago
I just wish Windows has built-in Docker so that i don't need to install anything like wsl,... Make docker run on bare-metal Windows is a huge improvement to my life ! Why? WSL or VM is stupid because it costs around 5-6GB of RAM without doing anything.
- jjmarinho 6y ago
  WSL is not even close to 5-6GB of RAM. My current instance of Ubuntu 20.04 is hogging around 1200MB while running rust-analyzer and some other devtools.
- coolspot 6y ago
  Just install WSL standalone edition. It runs on bare metal with no virtualization. Also GUI is much better and no tracking!
  - revskill 6y ago
    Thanks for the info. Could you give me more info on the link ? As i tried, wsl need a VM to run.
- bityard 6y ago
  Well, Docker is a Linux technology. If you really need Docker that badly and can't take the overhead of a VM, then it sounds like you would be better off just running Linux like the rest of us. :)
  - revskill 6y ago
    Aha, i think so. But i need to spend some times with Windows softwares, too ;)
  - mav3rick 6y ago
    There is a container runtime / API to abstract this. Pretty sure Windows has equivalents of namespaces and cgroups.
cletus 6y ago
I really see this as trying to buy enough time for someone to rescue the investors, maybe the founders and definitely not the employees with an acquihire. Docker is a good example of a company that (IMHO) should never have raised so much capital. It just doesn't have the moat to justify the valuation. HN has posted several submissions (eg [1]). Containers aren't new. Anyone can do it. So where is the moat? Possibilities include orchestration (which they lost to Google's Kubernetes). There's no barrier to creating images or even having a public registry of images. It always seemed tike containers were just going to be another feature on cloud platforms. Don't get me wrong: I think containers are a really good technology, for building, testing, deployment and so on. Docker never had a clear value add and over the years has failed to develop one. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22244706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22244706
- qeternity 6y ago
  While I am normally critical of the unicorn pizza-kitchen-on-wheels type of excess, I think this is only true in hindsight and has a lot to do with Docker lacking a commercially minded founder. Open source isn’t a business model. There are very synergistic business models that go hand in hand with OSS but that distinction is important. Github does not really have a defensible moat. I think the network effects there are mostly trying to back-solve for its popularity. But it’s just a good product that became synonymous with modern version control. Docker had similar potential, but needed more commercial creativity.
  - cletus 6y ago
    Github is a good comparison here because obviously anyone can run a Git server but Github did create a lot of value adds and the UI helped build a network effect for the ease os use, cloning, PRs and so on. What's more, Github became the engine for dependency management. Go springs to mind here. I actually thought this was a terrible system (eg putting repo owner names in import strings) but it speaks to ubiquity of Github. But what are Docker images? Maybe a few hundred lines of Dockerscript at the end of the day. Losing in orchestration I think was the obvious big fail. But they had an uphill battle here anyway because you really need to integrate such a thing with cloud platforms. I'm really not sure what Docker could've done differently here.
ggregoire 6y ago
There are at least 10 alternatives to Docker listed in those comments. I can't imagine what someone relatively new to containerisation think about it. Is this the equivalence to "JavaScript fatigue" in the DevOps world? Anyway, happy Docker user here. It changed the way I develop and distribute Python applications. Took me like 2 hours to learn enough to be productive. I'm sure there are better alternatives but Docker just covers my needs, it's well documented and easy to get started, everybody knows it and every cloud platform supports it.
mleonhard 6y ago
I've been waiting for two features from Docker: 1. Launch a container by specifying its image digest, not image ID [0] [1]. You can pull an image with a specific digest, but then it gets an ID that is unique to the image repository. Later deployments must use that different image ID. This makes deployment tooling needlessly complicated. And it breaks the security guarantees of the digest by allowing the repository to modify the image. 2. Copy a file into a container with docker-compose, without requiring Swarm [1]. Do financial problems explain their slowness? I wish they would just charge $100/year per seat for Docker for macOS and then fix the long-standing problems. And sell a hosted tool to do trusted builds of docker images from hashed sources. Reproducible builds would be great, too. [0] https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/16482#issuecomment-297827946 https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/16482#issuecomment-29782... [1] https://windsock.io/explaining-docker-image-ids/#contentaddressableids https://windsock.io/explaining-docker-image-ids/#contentaddr... [2] https://github.com/docker/compose/issues/5523 https://github.com/docker/compose/issues/5523
- tpetry 6y ago
  I would pay 100$/month if they would solve the slow filesystem performance. Every workaround solution has some problems, most often high latency or simply stopping the sync.
- e12e 6y ago
  Heh, regarding your: > 2. Copy a file into a container with docker-compose, without requiring Swarm I'm not quite sure I see why you can't get by with "docker cp" and need compose to resolve the container. But I also were unaware of the Docker sub commands "cp" and "commit". I think I prefer building containers and mounting config - but I see how the two could be abused, focusing on images rather than Dockerfile-s (and woe to the person that looses the carefully evolved Debian old-stable based base image that runs a mix of outdated oldstable packages and a few bits from current stable from two years ago when they were in testing, along with a custom build of node 13 and an outdated driver for a proprietary database...). Not sure I believe it's a good idea, but now I know it's possible. https://thenewstack.io/container-basics-how-to-commit-changes-to-a-docker-image/ https://thenewstack.io/container-basics-how-to-commit-change...
sandstrom 6y ago
I'd pay for a pro version of macOS Docker Desktop that didn't peg the CPU at ~30% with no activity in the containers :)
- xeromal 6y ago
  lol, docker recently consumed 22gb of ram on my desktop with no containers running. Windows 10 though
- m463 6y ago
  I think that's because macos has to run a VM to support docker. I figured apple would latch onto docker and get it running natively, but nobody over there thinks outside the apple ecosystem. It's all like the jackling house Wouldn't it be cool to say: FROM macos:10.13.4 RUN xcode-build ...
ohiovr 6y ago
May our free lunches continue forever. Thanks docker!
musicale 6y ago
It is my hope that Docker will continue to be a self-correcting problem.
musicale 6y ago
How much money has lxc raised? ;-)
hda111 6y ago
I feel sorry for the investors. They could have given the money to me and wouldn’t get it back either. The time of docker is over. Now you can run whatever container engine you want on WSL2. I doubt the macOS market is enough to earn money from it. And it’s still freeware.

299 points by nickjj 6y ago

Interesting to see this called a Series B. Did Docker hit reset after the split? Here's a separate thread for "Docker Series B: More Fuel To Help Dev Teams Get Ship Done" - with a bit more info on what the plan is from Scott. Interesting to see this news on the same day that "We don't need Docker" was also on the front page of Hacker News. I think we absolutely still need Docker in 2021. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26478669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26478669

libria 6y ago
> "We don't need Docker" was also on the front page of Hacker News. I read it as a typical "We don't need [Complex Tool] because we don't have [Complex Tool Solutions] problems". Not trivializing it, I think those articles are valuable hype-free analysis of the latest tool-of-the-day. "They don't need Docker" and "We absolutely need Docker" are non-contradictory.
- tyingq 6y ago
  There's also, though, things like K8S not using Docker, podman becoming popular, etc. Neither is a definitive nail, but it does erode Docker's moat a bit.
  - zapita 6y ago
    K8S uses containerd which is the official Docker runtime.
    - mroche 6y ago
      The difference being that Google has deprecated the shimming to Docker they had been doing with the “Docker” runtime to access containerd, so now it will go straight to the source by default. Red Hat OpenShift also switched from using Docker as its runtime with OpenShift 4 in 2019, though it was in favor of CRI-O rather than containerd.
      - zapita 6y ago
        All accurate. My point is that Kub deprecating the shimming does not affect Docker’s popularly or market share either way. The existence of the shim was an implementation detail and Docker themselves have been encouraging the switch to containerd. They clearly want the Docker brand to be attached to developer-facing tools instead of a hidden piece of increasingly commoditized infrastructure. If a critical mass of kubernetes deployments switched from containerd to cri-o, that would be more problematic for Docker, but that seems unlikely to happen. Openshift to my knowledge is the only major kubernetes distribution not based on containerd. At this stage of the adoption cycle, cri-o is unlikely to be more than a distant second to containerd.
        mroche 6y ago
        Yes, and I did not mean to diminish that context, more so expand upon the "k8s not using Docker" side of things from the parent you were responding to.
    - tyingq 6y ago
      "official Docker runtime" Yes, though not produced by Docker and does not require Docker.
- vendiddy 6y ago
  This 100% Better to think of these titles as "When you might need Docker" and "When you might not need Docker" so you can consider the tradeoffs rather than interpret it as a blanket statement, Docker is good/bad.
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  There are two very different and kind of opposite "we don't need Docker" perspectives. One is that of the previous article— "we don't need docker because we don't need containerized environments since our tooling produces a single binary which somehow has no dependencies, configuration, or data files, so there's nothing to containerize." The other is "we don't need Docker because we use tools like buildah, img, or kaniko to build OCI containers, our devs use podman, and we run this stuff in prod on a someone else's k8s PaaS that under the hood is backed by containerd."
- jack_riminton 6y ago
  Problem is the cargo-culting. A lot of startups don't have the complex problems Many are anticipating scaling problems they'll never have and wasting a lot of time, effort and money in that process
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    Maybe, but it's such a balance. I'm finally getting into Kubernetes and after years of hearing how awful it was to get it going, I was shocked at how painless it was to stand up microk8s locally and sling Helm charts at it, get Jenkins generating agents on it, get metrics from it, etc. If I were deploying something to a cloud, I would absolutely do this approach with some k8s-as-a-service provider over rolling my own machine images or having to deal with remote controlling instances using something like Ansible. Yes, it would be possible to get sucked down a rabbit hole with over-emphasizing scaling, clustering, whatever upfront, but IMO these tools are now mature enough that it's a reasonable workflow even if you're just deploying a single instance of a container with one statically-linked binary in it.
- duxup 6y ago
  A lot of those articles and posts are what I think of 'exploratory' someone doesn't want / need a thing,t hey present their way of doing things and we can all learn something from them... even if we don't do things like they do. God knows how much "don't need JavaScript" gets posted...
- TheGRS 6y ago
  Yesterday was in a meeting discussing our build pipeline and we had this moment of introspection where we realized "wow, we do a completely containerized, micro-serviced app and it actually works really well for the most part". When Docker was very new I remember dealing with all manner of bizarre issues, mostly because the engineers just weren't used to how to use it yet. But if you have some decent idea of how to architect it then Docker is a huge boon IMO. People are also totally right to question why some new fancy tool is needed when the old way works. Its best to just view all these things as tools at your disposal rather than necessities.
tsejerome97 6y ago
As a 10+ years old company / YC company + significant amount of market share, I was expecting Docket to be like series D-F or even going public. Wondering if it is actually common for companies in CA to be like that...
- kentonv 6y ago
  Looks like original Docker did Series E in 2017: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/docker/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/docker/company_finan... This is apparently "new/restructured Docker" which did Series A in 2019. From the footnote in the article: https://www.docker.com/press-release/docker-new-direction https://www.docker.com/press-release/docker-new-direction It does seem weird to just start the letters over like that, as if it's a new hot startup.
  - grey-area 6y ago
    Doing a series H might make investors think harder about why they need 8 rounds of funding over 12 years or so and still didn't manage to turn a profit.
    - kevstev 6y ago
      I had a recruiter a few years ago pitch me about an amazing opportunity at a series F company that he wouldn't name in the initial pitch email. I didn't see that as an advantage at all. That's 6 rounds of investors who are all going to need to get paid and then some before you see a penny. It also implied to me the early growth/fun stage was over and they either limping along or so big to be unrecognizable as a legit startup.
    - tsejerome97 6y ago
      That's quite interesting, let's see if it will pivot a bit for the "new" trend like going serverless
- nonameiguess 6y ago
  I always get amused by D-Wave, the 22 year-old "startup" that is now on its 19th funding round: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/d-wave-systems/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/d-wave-systems/compa...
anthonyskipper 6y ago
They already did series-e and looped back around: https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/docker-series-e--a283f818 https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/docker-series-e--a2...
boynamedsue 6y ago
Docker recapitalized in 2019 when they sold the enterprise business to Mirantis. So, yes Docker hit the reset button and wiped out all the existing shareholders.

endisneigh 6y ago

I hope they work on Docker Swarm. “Docker compose” for multiple machines needs working on!

dgellow 6y ago
Didn’t they drop Swarm ~1 year ago when they sold their enterprise offering? I thought they decided to instead focus on k8s. All of this becomes so confusing.
- polyrand 6y ago
  Now there's something called Swarm mode built directly into the main Docker engine. I think that was the "replacement" of the classic Docker Swarm.
  - brodock 6y ago
    So, who owns the "Docker Engine" ? Mirantis or Docker Inc?
    - Nullabillity 6y ago
      Mirantis
  - Nullabillity 6y ago
    That migration was way before the acquisition. The Mirantis deprecation is about Swarm Mode.
    - dgellow 6y ago
      All of this is so confusing…
ghaff 6y ago
I believe that Swarm and the other enterprise-oriented pieces all went to Mirantis. Docker, the company, is now specifically oriented to developers.

f430 6y ago

does docker make net profit? or is the "future" potential earnings at a crazy multiple still making sense when yields are rising and inflation is expected to rise?

meddlepal 6y ago

Im still a little surprised Microsoft hasn't bought Docker (or one of the other big compute-infra players).

ghaff 6y ago
Docker sold its compute infra business.
- meddlepal 6y ago
  I wasn't suggesting they buy Docker's (former) compute-infra business but that it would be a good complimentary buy to Microsoft's or one of the other compute-infra player's businesses to own Docker since it is an additional tap into the developer market.
wealthyyy 6y ago
If they did, they would rename it as Microcubes.
pjmlp 6y ago
Why bother? They have their own container management infrastructure.
- meddlepal 6y ago
  Inbound marketing and developer mind share. Seamless integration between docker tooling and Azure etc etc.

mark_and_sweep 6y ago

At first, I wanted to read the article. But having to wait more than one minute to submit my cookie preferences, I closed the tab and left. If anyone at Docker is reading this: Please reconsider your cookie banner implementation.

dean177 6y ago
Trust arc is incredibly obnoxious
- raverbashing 6y ago
  Especially as a corporate site (that is, not a click-farm that relies on tracking ads) this is unacceptable "Trust arc" I'd trust the site more if it had a sensible cookie policy
- birktj 6y ago
  Is this kind of artificial delay even legal under the GDRP? Does anyone know if there has been any lawsuits against trust arc and co over this stuff? After waiting forever I was greeted with: "Some opt-outs failed. Opt-out requests responded with error or timeout. Please try again". How is this okay?
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    It isn’t (GDPR regulates how consent can be obtained and shenanigans like these are an obvious example of bad faith) but the entities supposed to enforce the GDPR are absolutely incompetent and don’t care.
TLightful 6y ago
That's some decent patience you've got there. I give websites 5 seconds, tops.
kawsper 6y ago
They are aware of it, I've contacted them multiple times about it, they just don't care.

paxys 6y ago

Considering how entrenched Docker has been in global tech infrastructure for so many years, I automatically assumed that the company was worth billions already, but guess not. I wonder why they haven't been bought out by Microsoft or Google, if nothing else then just for the talent.

systemvoltage 6y ago
It is obvious. This is a common pattern: 1. Offer open-source 100% free product that's absolutely ground breaking, unlike anything else. 2. Get a shitload of users and free PR machine gets rolling. Network effects kick in. 3. Go to investors with your active user count in excess of millions. 4. Investors go bonkers and their eyes swell up with all the ways they can exploit these addicted-to-free user base. 5. Company has trouble monetizing the users. Users are pissed. 6. We all wonder why they couldn't make billions. It just happened to Elastic search a couple of months ago when Amazon swiped the rug from under them. Good. This should be a lesson to all the companies that want to follow this pattern. Without Step 1, Docker would have had a much more difficult time to get traction and would have to compete on a level ground. So, they short circuit this competition by going full 100% free product route. I have zero empathy for these companies and their investors.
- zapita 6y ago
  Except Docker had already raised $10M before launching. So they do not match your pattern.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    Doesn't matter. $10M initial round to offer free product to get users aboard. The key point is to get users addicted to free. Uber did this by undercutting the entire taxi industry at a loss. Ever wondered why your rides were so cheap!? Jio did the same in India, offer free unlimited internet on their phone service and wipe out the competition.
    - 6y ago

abledon 6y ago

Thank god, someones gotta pay for the free container registry all my sideprojects depend on!

bredren 6y ago
Have you tried GitHub packages?
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Yes. Someones gotta pay for the free container registry all my sideprojects depend on!
  - mvzvm 6y ago
    You are all over this thread being snarky, and commenting in what seems to be bad faith. Please stop, this is not reddit.
    - systemvoltage 6y ago
      I’m sorry if it came across this way. The snarky comment highlights pretty well that we magically expect almost without a second thought that GitHub is free. Support SourceHut and pay for hosting git if people want to break away from ostensibly free services. Or pay for Github. SourceHut is also open source.
      - mvzvm 6y ago
        In what way is Github not free?
        mrkeen 6y ago
        Apologies in advance for the snark: https://github.com/pricing https://github.com/pricing
        deleted 6y ago

yuppie_scum 6y ago

Podman

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
What about podman?

neom 6y ago

Docker has Donnie Berkholz running product as of recently. I met him when he was at Redmonk and I was incredibly impressed by how sharp he is. Given they now have him as VP of Products, this cash injection is certainly more interesting as I'd expect him to do something useful with it.

jrm4 6y ago

Can't help but see this as bad for everything; to me it feels like if "curl" or "ssh" raises $23M. I would love for these people who work on these great tools to make lots of money, but what this means is that "now Docker has to figure out how to squeeze money out of this particular (admittedly good) tool in the chain" -- and the tool usually suffers.

zapita 6y ago
Docker was created by a VC-backed startup in 2013. So they have had an incentive to make money from the very start. At no point was Docker not financed by VC money.
- jrm4 6y ago
  That doesn't really address anything I said? Regardless of how it got started -- it simply feels like the type of tool that doesn't fit well with a high-profit model because it is so backend/developer oriented. I've said it before, if you're trying to be profitable, that means there must be some part of it that is, "if you don't pay, you don't get it." What is that thing for Docker (a generally very open-sourcey thing), and will it be worth it?
devmor 6y ago
Yeah, this is abjectly terrifying to me. A signal that I need to begin looking at alternatives to Docker.
- IceWreck 6y ago
  Docker popularized containers, but it does nothing special. Podman is the closest alternative, but a lot of engines can run images from any oci registry like docker hub. Other engines you might wanna look at: rkt, lxc with an oci template, etc. Kubernetes with cri-o runs oci containers as well.
musicale 6y ago
This is exactly right. Docker is like lxc/lxd with some extra stuff (much of which I personally dislike.) It's not rocket science, and podman is obviously a drop-in replacement. The ssh example is good though - so much depends on ssh, yet how much do we invest in it?

SilasX 6y ago

I'm confused -- is this a liquidity event or something (or somehow to let employees cash out options)? The release doesn't mention anything about that, and yet $23M seems like a small amount of money for Docker to have to beg the equity market for, given how small that figure is compared to their revenues: https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/docker-monitoring-market-size-2020-growth-strategies-opportunity-challenges-rising-trends-and-revenue-analysis-2027-2020-12-21 https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/docker-monitoring-...

imwillofficial 6y ago

I’m happy to see docker get a little more lifeline.

IceWreck 6y ago

Does the Docker company even do anything to stay relevant? * The popularized containers but their core tool has been replaced by superior alternatives like Podman. * They sold their enterprise registry which wouldve earned them actual money. * The consumer registry has tons of free/cheaper alternatives like github's container registry, something from gitlab and on the enterprise side, there is Red Hat's quay. * Docker Swarm is dead compared to Kubernetes.

ColdHeat 6y ago
I mostly agree here but I'm not really sure that Podman has replaced Docker. I'm also curious how you're determining that Podman is superior to Docker?
- pjmlp 6y ago
  It definitely has on Red-Hat.
m463 6y ago
I think podman is a good start, but not there yet. Give it a year or two.

filleokus 6y ago

It feels like Docker (Inc) is becoming less and less "relevant" for each year that passes. At least from my perspective, they led the popularisation of containerisation and the whole cattle-not-pets approach of deploying apps. They created big and long lasting change in the industry. But they seem to have lost the production environment race to Kubernetes, at least for now. They are the biggest player in the dev-machine market, but more alternatives are popping up making it even harder to monetise. And containerd isn't a part of Docker (Inc) any more. They do have Docker Hub, and its privileged position as the default registry of all Docker installs. But I don't really see why paying (i.e enterprise) customers would pick Docker Hub over their friendly neighbourhood cloud provider registry where they already have contracts. Will Docker start rate limiting the public free repos even harder? Maybe making big orgs pay for the privilege of being hosted in the default docker registry? Charging to have the images "verified"? Anyways, I hope Docker find some viable business model, it would be sad to see them fail commercially after arguably succeeding in changing the (devops) world.

feynmanzhou 6y ago
It is no doubt that Kubernetes is popolar and powerful, even some folks believe Kubernetes is the next-gen distributed operating system. But the most challenging thing is the high learning cury for Kubernetes novice. I would recommend an open source Kubernetes platform solution for novice. https://kubesphere.io/ https://kubesphere.io/
brian_herman 6y ago
I want docker to succeed but I agree with you... I just love typing the docker command and the registry was great.
mbreese 6y ago
Is there any profit to be gained from knowing which repositories are the most active? Which get downloaded the most? I mean... you'd think there would be some "market research" type of thing that could be sold, but now that I think about it more, I'm not sure. I assume most of the repositories are either OSS that are pulled a ton, or are pulled by an individual or small team. I'm not sure what the business opportunity is from that knowledge. If there was such a market for that information, I assume they'd have already tried to exploit it...

brainzap 6y ago

And still a horrible advanced experience, the only thing the update does is change the UI.

purple_ferret 6y ago

Should have went the SPAC route

goatinaboat 6y ago
should have went the SPAC route Or issued Doggercoin

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

adictator 6y ago

Totally tangential: The last 3 DockerCons featured at least one hijāb glorification. Not sure what message Docker is trying to give to the world, especially when the rest of the world is fighting this oppressive practice that demeans & objectifies women! Let's see how many hijabs are used in this year's DockerCon.

supermatt 6y ago

Ive tried giving docker money MANY times, but their pre-sales support is absolutely abysmal. Maybe this will help fix that!

staunch 6y ago

I believe the reason it's "Series B" after like 10 VC raises is that Docker, Inc recapitalized and basically wiped out existing shareholders (former employees, etc). I'm surprised there's not been a stockholder lawsuit, since they could've presumably sold the company for something and returned some money to the prior stockholders.

miohtama 6y ago
Funding rounds overflow after Z. It is known.

trhway 6y ago

Somebody should just buy to them out of misery. Looks to be very cheap for the name recognition and some people.

revskill 6y ago

I just wish Windows has built-in Docker so that i don't need to install anything like wsl,... Make docker run on bare-metal Windows is a huge improvement to my life ! Why? WSL or VM is stupid because it costs around 5-6GB of RAM without doing anything.

jjmarinho 6y ago
WSL is not even close to 5-6GB of RAM. My current instance of Ubuntu 20.04 is hogging around 1200MB while running rust-analyzer and some other devtools.
coolspot 6y ago
Just install WSL standalone edition. It runs on bare metal with no virtualization. Also GUI is much better and no tracking!
- revskill 6y ago
  Thanks for the info. Could you give me more info on the link ? As i tried, wsl need a VM to run.
bityard 6y ago
Well, Docker is a Linux technology. If you really need Docker that badly and can't take the overhead of a VM, then it sounds like you would be better off just running Linux like the rest of us. :)
- revskill 6y ago
  Aha, i think so. But i need to spend some times with Windows softwares, too ;)
- mav3rick 6y ago
  There is a container runtime / API to abstract this. Pretty sure Windows has equivalents of namespaces and cgroups.

cletus 6y ago

I really see this as trying to buy enough time for someone to rescue the investors, maybe the founders and definitely not the employees with an acquihire. Docker is a good example of a company that (IMHO) should never have raised so much capital. It just doesn't have the moat to justify the valuation. HN has posted several submissions (eg [1]). Containers aren't new. Anyone can do it. So where is the moat? Possibilities include orchestration (which they lost to Google's Kubernetes). There's no barrier to creating images or even having a public registry of images. It always seemed tike containers were just going to be another feature on cloud platforms. Don't get me wrong: I think containers are a really good technology, for building, testing, deployment and so on. Docker never had a clear value add and over the years has failed to develop one. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22244706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22244706

qeternity 6y ago
While I am normally critical of the unicorn pizza-kitchen-on-wheels type of excess, I think this is only true in hindsight and has a lot to do with Docker lacking a commercially minded founder. Open source isn’t a business model. There are very synergistic business models that go hand in hand with OSS but that distinction is important. Github does not really have a defensible moat. I think the network effects there are mostly trying to back-solve for its popularity. But it’s just a good product that became synonymous with modern version control. Docker had similar potential, but needed more commercial creativity.
- cletus 6y ago
  Github is a good comparison here because obviously anyone can run a Git server but Github did create a lot of value adds and the UI helped build a network effect for the ease os use, cloning, PRs and so on. What's more, Github became the engine for dependency management. Go springs to mind here. I actually thought this was a terrible system (eg putting repo owner names in import strings) but it speaks to ubiquity of Github. But what are Docker images? Maybe a few hundred lines of Dockerscript at the end of the day. Losing in orchestration I think was the obvious big fail. But they had an uphill battle here anyway because you really need to integrate such a thing with cloud platforms. I'm really not sure what Docker could've done differently here.

ggregoire 6y ago

There are at least 10 alternatives to Docker listed in those comments. I can't imagine what someone relatively new to containerisation think about it. Is this the equivalence to "JavaScript fatigue" in the DevOps world? Anyway, happy Docker user here. It changed the way I develop and distribute Python applications. Took me like 2 hours to learn enough to be productive. I'm sure there are better alternatives but Docker just covers my needs, it's well documented and easy to get started, everybody knows it and every cloud platform supports it.

mleonhard 6y ago

I've been waiting for two features from Docker: 1. Launch a container by specifying its image digest, not image ID [0] [1]. You can pull an image with a specific digest, but then it gets an ID that is unique to the image repository. Later deployments must use that different image ID. This makes deployment tooling needlessly complicated. And it breaks the security guarantees of the digest by allowing the repository to modify the image. 2. Copy a file into a container with docker-compose, without requiring Swarm [1]. Do financial problems explain their slowness? I wish they would just charge $100/year per seat for Docker for macOS and then fix the long-standing problems. And sell a hosted tool to do trusted builds of docker images from hashed sources. Reproducible builds would be great, too. [0] https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/16482#issuecomment-297827946 https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/16482#issuecomment-29782... [1] https://windsock.io/explaining-docker-image-ids/#contentaddressableids https://windsock.io/explaining-docker-image-ids/#contentaddr... [2] https://github.com/docker/compose/issues/5523 https://github.com/docker/compose/issues/5523

tpetry 6y ago
I would pay 100$/month if they would solve the slow filesystem performance. Every workaround solution has some problems, most often high latency or simply stopping the sync.
e12e 6y ago
Heh, regarding your: > 2. Copy a file into a container with docker-compose, without requiring Swarm I'm not quite sure I see why you can't get by with "docker cp" and need compose to resolve the container. But I also were unaware of the Docker sub commands "cp" and "commit". I think I prefer building containers and mounting config - but I see how the two could be abused, focusing on images rather than Dockerfile-s (and woe to the person that looses the carefully evolved Debian old-stable based base image that runs a mix of outdated oldstable packages and a few bits from current stable from two years ago when they were in testing, along with a custom build of node 13 and an outdated driver for a proprietary database...). Not sure I believe it's a good idea, but now I know it's possible. https://thenewstack.io/container-basics-how-to-commit-changes-to-a-docker-image/ https://thenewstack.io/container-basics-how-to-commit-change...

sandstrom 6y ago

I'd pay for a pro version of macOS Docker Desktop that didn't peg the CPU at ~30% with no activity in the containers :)

xeromal 6y ago
lol, docker recently consumed 22gb of ram on my desktop with no containers running. Windows 10 though
m463 6y ago
I think that's because macos has to run a VM to support docker. I figured apple would latch onto docker and get it running natively, but nobody over there thinks outside the apple ecosystem. It's all like the jackling house Wouldn't it be cool to say: FROM macos:10.13.4 RUN xcode-build ...

ohiovr 6y ago

May our free lunches continue forever. Thanks docker!

musicale 6y ago

It is my hope that Docker will continue to be a self-correcting problem.

musicale 6y ago

How much money has lxc raised? ;-)

hda111 6y ago

I feel sorry for the investors. They could have given the money to me and wouldn’t get it back either. The time of docker is over. Now you can run whatever container engine you want on WSL2. I doubt the macOS market is enough to earn money from it. And it’s still freeware.