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This appears to be cutting of their nose to spite their face. We have a team of 50+ engineers that all use Docker for Mac for daily development tasks, but I sus

by dpratt 5y ago

This appears to be cutting of their nose to spite their face. We have a team of 50+ engineers that all use Docker for Mac for daily development tasks, but I suspect that will no longer be true in a rather short amount of time. Frankly, I don’t really know if anybody actually uses the UI components for it outside of starting and stopping the engine and for basic configuration of the VM. Everything else that comes with it is just useless cruft for our use cases. As soon as there is a viable alternative (and I’d be happy to contribute to the effort), I’ll be moving away from Docker for Mac.

gigatexal 5y ago
I tried getting podman working pointing at a Linux server and ram into issues as an alternative to Docker. I’m hoping the kinks get worked out and I can move over.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  We have been using podman here for all of our developers and have yet to find anything different to docker. Perhaps you are using a more obscure feature.
  - hda111 5y ago
    I think podman is a lot easier than docker. You can stop all containers easily (without xargs) podman stop -a or you can mount the current directory podman run -v .:/mnt or you can mount while you build podman build -v /dir:/dir or you can work entirely without root and have the same user on the host also in the container: podman run --userns=keep-id (useful when a directory is mounted into container but the application refuses to run as root)
rcarmo 5y ago
For the Mac, just get Canonical’s Multipass (http://multipass.run http://multipass.run) and do an apt-get to install Docker into a VM and use VS Code to “remote” to it. It will automatically install the Docker extension inside the Linux VM and you’re set. For Windows, use WSL2 and do the same. Both can mount “local” folders, although the setup is obviously different. You now have a better way to manage containers than ever before.
- alanwreath 5y ago
  Can’t say that limiting developers to VSCode is necessarily a step forward.
  - rcarmo 5y ago
    Well, it does set up everything automagically for you. I can also dig around for my Docker CLI config and the right way to expose the Docker TCP socket to the host, but if you need a quick way to get working, VS Code is it.
  - mbreese 5y ago
    You don't need VSCode specifically, but it does provide an alternative GUI for managing Docker containers that isn't tied directly to Docker Desktop. You could use anything to manage the Docker VM... VSCode is just one option.
- nklmilojevic 5y ago
  Doesn't work on M1 chips yet.
  - osdril 5y ago
    It's in "beta" right now but it works quite well (you can find the binary in the dedicated GitHub issue). Under the hood it just uses QEMU which in turn uses Apple's Hypervisor.framework for virtualization
    - johnnypangs 5y ago
      I believe this is the issue referenced above: https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1857 https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1857
- judge2020 5y ago
  Do you mean APT via https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/ https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/, correct?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
solarkraft 5y ago
> As soon as there is a viable alternative (and I’d be happy to contribute to the effort), I’ll be moving away from Docker for Mac. I just SSH into my server. The biggest pain about macOS is that it can't easily mount SFTP.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Ouch, really? Cyberduck was always one of my first installs simply due to how much I spited Finder, but I didn't know things were... that bad.
- mockingbirdy 5y ago
  You can mount SFTP with Mountain Duck [1], from the creators of Cyberduck. Costs around $40. [1]: https://mountainduck.io https://mountainduck.io
- vhodges 5y ago
  Fuse/sshfs exists for OSX. Seems to work okay the little I played with it.
  - watermelon0 5y ago
    I used fuse/sshfs quite a lot in the past, and never had much issues (I think most of my issues were with how my editor displayed and refreshed the file list, not with the actual sshfs implementation, and were similar to those on Linux/Windows.)
  - solarkraft 5y ago
    It’s not completely awful, but quite a long way from mounting a natively supported share, made worse by the already convoluted setup process that has been made worse by the project going proprietary.
  - hda111 5y ago
    Lima project works on an alternative to sshfs https://github.com/lima-vm/sshwebdav https://github.com/lima-vm/sshwebdav
- 5y ago
boublepop 5y ago
Personally I think just running portainer as a container is a viable alternative to docket desktop. But I never really used the UI much, so perhaps there are features I don’t know of.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Unless there's podman or similar for local dev, you'd still need Docker Desktop to use it on Windows/MacOS.
zapita 5y ago
You’re going to spend scarce engineering resources reimplementing a Docker for Mac alternative, then roll out your immature alternative to 50+ engineers, instead of paying a few hundred dollars a month for a good product and moving on? It seems to me you would be the one cutting off your nose to spite your face in this scenario.
- coding123 5y ago
  The reason this move isn't popular is because it seemed like local docker development (for any size corporation) was always going to be free. If I personally had known this was in the cards I would have invested (time, money and effort) into alternatives earlier on. Instead they killed all the competition and are now demanding money. So yeah, this is the first move by Docker that has made me kind of mad at the company. How does this affect consultants that want to introduce docker to large corporations but small teams? A lot of scenarios become crappy now.
  - dralley 5y ago
    > Instead they killed all the competition and are now demanding money. So yeah, this is the first move by Docker that has made me kind of mad at the company. Which alternatives did they kill? The Podman tool ecosystem is doing fine and is closing in on being a complete replacement, and Docker Swarm hasn't exactly killed k{number}s.
    - brazzledazzle 5y ago
      "k{number}s" means k8s, right? Is this a reference or something?
      - dralley 5y ago
        k8s, k3s
- chrisandchris 5y ago
  Assuming that you currently don‘t need any other than the functionality the free plan provides, and assuming all 50 engineers need a license, your „a few hundred dollars“ is actually $1‘250/month just for getting the same as before. I understand (in some way) the decision Docker made but I am not sure it is the way-to-go. However, it is a very hard question and if I had to pay a monthly fee for each component I‘m using to develop a solution, one or the other project would not even start because it‘s not worth it anymore.
mgkimsal 5y ago
> (and I’d be happy to contribute to the effort) Isn't paying their fee also contributing to the effort of what they've put in to it so far, and ideally what they'll do to keep it working and improve over time?
make3 5y ago
21$/month/user is nothing for the business setting.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  Between getting that approved and paid by the company or just using another tool, I will use another tool.
- lamnk 5y ago
  Yes, it's nothing for a single tool, even with hundreds or thousands of dev. But in total it quickly adds up for a lot of tools.
ash_while 5y ago
I made https://github.com/lime-green/remote-docker-aws https://github.com/lime-green/remote-docker-aws a while ago and I've been happily using it for about a year. It throws docker in a ec2 VM and allows you to call docker as if it were running locally by tunneling and syncing files. The network file systems I tried (sshfs, nfs) were way too slow when used as docker volumes so it uses a tool called unison which does two-way file syncing (rsync only does one way, which is a problem for something like making django migrations)
dgellow 5y ago
So you have a tool that your team use daily, but won’t pay a small license for it? I’m not sure I understand that logic. If the tool you have worked for you when it was free, it still works for you when you pay a small cost per month. Unless the cost is really that huge, I don’t see why that would be a reason to change.
- yaitsyaboi 5y ago
  Not only is he opposed to paying a license fee, he will contribute to the development of an entirely new, almost certainly worse, tool.
- thinkharderdev 5y ago
  I think it is mostly the issue of dealing with byzantine corporate procurement processes. Also, it's really not all the clear what value-add Docker for Desktop is. Essentially it is just doing what you can do using the OSS components (running a Linux VM which runs the docker daemon and mounting a Unix socket on the host machine to talk to it). The only "value add" is a UI app on the host machine which I have never once used personally or witnessed anyone else using. I certainly don't begrudge Docker for trying to create a sustainable business, but as an "open core" model it's really hard to understand what their proprietary extensions are that people will want to pay for. They took a stab at the container orchestration space with Docker Swarm (which you could definitely imagine having an "enterprise version") but that lost out pretty definitively to Kubernetes. So they're left with Docker Hub? That just doesn't seem like it will really be much of a revenue generator. You're either using whatever cloud container registry is available (ECR, GCR etc) or you're using a more general artifact repository like Artifactory, GitHub which can be a container registry as well as a Maven/NPM/etc artifact repository.

by dpratt 5y ago

gigatexal 5y ago

I tried getting podman working pointing at a Linux server and ram into issues as an alternative to Docker. I’m hoping the kinks get worked out and I can move over.

SilverRed 5y ago
We have been using podman here for all of our developers and have yet to find anything different to docker. Perhaps you are using a more obscure feature.
- hda111 5y ago
  I think podman is a lot easier than docker. You can stop all containers easily (without xargs) podman stop -a or you can mount the current directory podman run -v .:/mnt or you can mount while you build podman build -v /dir:/dir or you can work entirely without root and have the same user on the host also in the container: podman run --userns=keep-id (useful when a directory is mounted into container but the application refuses to run as root)

rcarmo 5y ago

For the Mac, just get Canonical’s Multipass (http://multipass.run http://multipass.run) and do an apt-get to install Docker into a VM and use VS Code to “remote” to it. It will automatically install the Docker extension inside the Linux VM and you’re set. For Windows, use WSL2 and do the same. Both can mount “local” folders, although the setup is obviously different. You now have a better way to manage containers than ever before.

alanwreath 5y ago
Can’t say that limiting developers to VSCode is necessarily a step forward.
- rcarmo 5y ago
  Well, it does set up everything automagically for you. I can also dig around for my Docker CLI config and the right way to expose the Docker TCP socket to the host, but if you need a quick way to get working, VS Code is it.
- mbreese 5y ago
  You don't need VSCode specifically, but it does provide an alternative GUI for managing Docker containers that isn't tied directly to Docker Desktop. You could use anything to manage the Docker VM... VSCode is just one option.
nklmilojevic 5y ago
Doesn't work on M1 chips yet.
- osdril 5y ago
  It's in "beta" right now but it works quite well (you can find the binary in the dedicated GitHub issue). Under the hood it just uses QEMU which in turn uses Apple's Hypervisor.framework for virtualization
  - johnnypangs 5y ago
    I believe this is the issue referenced above: https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1857 https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1857
judge2020 5y ago
Do you mean APT via https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/ https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/, correct?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

solarkraft 5y ago

> As soon as there is a viable alternative (and I’d be happy to contribute to the effort), I’ll be moving away from Docker for Mac. I just SSH into my server. The biggest pain about macOS is that it can't easily mount SFTP.

smoldesu 5y ago
Ouch, really? Cyberduck was always one of my first installs simply due to how much I spited Finder, but I didn't know things were... that bad.
mockingbirdy 5y ago
You can mount SFTP with Mountain Duck [1], from the creators of Cyberduck. Costs around $40. [1]: https://mountainduck.io https://mountainduck.io
vhodges 5y ago
Fuse/sshfs exists for OSX. Seems to work okay the little I played with it.
- watermelon0 5y ago
  I used fuse/sshfs quite a lot in the past, and never had much issues (I think most of my issues were with how my editor displayed and refreshed the file list, not with the actual sshfs implementation, and were similar to those on Linux/Windows.)
- solarkraft 5y ago
  It’s not completely awful, but quite a long way from mounting a natively supported share, made worse by the already convoluted setup process that has been made worse by the project going proprietary.
- hda111 5y ago
  Lima project works on an alternative to sshfs https://github.com/lima-vm/sshwebdav https://github.com/lima-vm/sshwebdav
5y ago

boublepop 5y ago

Personally I think just running portainer as a container is a viable alternative to docket desktop. But I never really used the UI much, so perhaps there are features I don’t know of.

judge2020 5y ago
Unless there's podman or similar for local dev, you'd still need Docker Desktop to use it on Windows/MacOS.

zapita 5y ago

You’re going to spend scarce engineering resources reimplementing a Docker for Mac alternative, then roll out your immature alternative to 50+ engineers, instead of paying a few hundred dollars a month for a good product and moving on? It seems to me you would be the one cutting off your nose to spite your face in this scenario.

coding123 5y ago
The reason this move isn't popular is because it seemed like local docker development (for any size corporation) was always going to be free. If I personally had known this was in the cards I would have invested (time, money and effort) into alternatives earlier on. Instead they killed all the competition and are now demanding money. So yeah, this is the first move by Docker that has made me kind of mad at the company. How does this affect consultants that want to introduce docker to large corporations but small teams? A lot of scenarios become crappy now.
- dralley 5y ago
  > Instead they killed all the competition and are now demanding money. So yeah, this is the first move by Docker that has made me kind of mad at the company. Which alternatives did they kill? The Podman tool ecosystem is doing fine and is closing in on being a complete replacement, and Docker Swarm hasn't exactly killed k{number}s.
  - brazzledazzle 5y ago
    "k{number}s" means k8s, right? Is this a reference or something?
    - dralley 5y ago
      k8s, k3s
chrisandchris 5y ago
Assuming that you currently don‘t need any other than the functionality the free plan provides, and assuming all 50 engineers need a license, your „a few hundred dollars“ is actually $1‘250/month just for getting the same as before. I understand (in some way) the decision Docker made but I am not sure it is the way-to-go. However, it is a very hard question and if I had to pay a monthly fee for each component I‘m using to develop a solution, one or the other project would not even start because it‘s not worth it anymore.

mgkimsal 5y ago

> (and I’d be happy to contribute to the effort) Isn't paying their fee also contributing to the effort of what they've put in to it so far, and ideally what they'll do to keep it working and improve over time?

make3 5y ago

21$/month/user is nothing for the business setting.

speedgoose 5y ago
Between getting that approved and paid by the company or just using another tool, I will use another tool.
lamnk 5y ago
Yes, it's nothing for a single tool, even with hundreds or thousands of dev. But in total it quickly adds up for a lot of tools.

ash_while 5y ago

I made https://github.com/lime-green/remote-docker-aws https://github.com/lime-green/remote-docker-aws a while ago and I've been happily using it for about a year. It throws docker in a ec2 VM and allows you to call docker as if it were running locally by tunneling and syncing files. The network file systems I tried (sshfs, nfs) were way too slow when used as docker volumes so it uses a tool called unison which does two-way file syncing (rsync only does one way, which is a problem for something like making django migrations)

dgellow 5y ago

So you have a tool that your team use daily, but won’t pay a small license for it? I’m not sure I understand that logic. If the tool you have worked for you when it was free, it still works for you when you pay a small cost per month. Unless the cost is really that huge, I don’t see why that would be a reason to change.

yaitsyaboi 5y ago
Not only is he opposed to paying a license fee, he will contribute to the development of an entirely new, almost certainly worse, tool.
thinkharderdev 5y ago
I think it is mostly the issue of dealing with byzantine corporate procurement processes. Also, it's really not all the clear what value-add Docker for Desktop is. Essentially it is just doing what you can do using the OSS components (running a Linux VM which runs the docker daemon and mounting a Unix socket on the host machine to talk to it). The only "value add" is a UI app on the host machine which I have never once used personally or witnessed anyone else using. I certainly don't begrudge Docker for trying to create a sustainable business, but as an "open core" model it's really hard to understand what their proprietary extensions are that people will want to pay for. They took a stab at the container orchestration space with Docker Swarm (which you could definitely imagine having an "enterprise version") but that lost out pretty definitively to Kubernetes. So they're left with Docker Hub? That just doesn't seem like it will really be much of a revenue generator. You're either using whatever cloud container registry is available (ECR, GCR etc) or you're using a more general artifact repository like Artifactory, GitHub which can be a container registry as well as a Maven/NPM/etc artifact repository.