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Docker the tool has been a massive benefit to software development, every now and then I have a moan about the hassle of getting something bootstrapped to run o

Docker the tool has been a massive benefit to software development, every now and then I have a moan about the hassle of getting something bootstrapped to run on Docker, but it's still worlds better than the old ways of managing dependencies and making sure everyone on a project is aligned on what versions of things are installed. Unfortunately Docker the company appears to be dying, this is the latest in a long line of decisions that are clearly being made because they can't work out how to build a business around what is at it's core a nice UI for Linux containers. My hope is that before the inevitable shuttering of Docker Inc another organisations (ideally a coop of some variety, but that's probably wishful thinking) pops up to take over the bits that matter, and then hopefully we can all stop trying to keep up with the latest way in which our workflows have been broken to try and make a few dollars.

frognumber 4y ago
Do you remember SCO?
- emeraldd 4y ago
  Honestly, this is reminding me of Oracle after buying Sun.
spicyusername 4y ago
ideally a coop of some variety This is the role I feel like podman, the tool developed by Red Hat, is filling.
- quaintdev 4y ago
  Podman is great and is first class citizen on Fedora. It also integrates nicely with SystemD. My only gripe with it is not many developers provide podman configuration on their install pages like they do with docker compose
  - regularfry 4y ago
    I'm using docker-compose with a podman VM for development on a mac. Works ok so far. It wasn't quite slick enough when Docker pulled the licence switch last year, but the experience in the last couple of months has been pretty painless.
  - majewsky 4y ago
    Tangent: Why is the misspelling "SystemD" so common, when it has always been "systemd"? I would understand "Systemd" or "SYSTEMD" or something, but why specifically this weird spelling?
    - microtonal 4y ago
      People not familiar with tacking on a lowercased ‘d’ to the name for daemons?
    - robohoe 4y ago
      Probably to specifically call it out as "systemd" versus autocorrected misspelling of "systems".
    - kachnuv_ocasek 4y ago
      I've always thought of it as in analogy to System V.
      - cosmojg 4y ago
        Nah, it's French. > System D is a manner of responding to challenges that require one to have the ability to think quickly, to adapt, and to improvise when getting a job done. > The term is a direct translation of French Système D. The letter D refers to any one of the French nouns débrouille, débrouillardise or démerde (French slang). The verbs se débrouiller and se démerder mean to make do, to manage, especially in an adverse situation. Basically, it refers to one's ability and need to be resourceful. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_D
      - yrro 4y ago
- jacooper 4y ago
  Its not as easy nor as simple as docker + docker compose.
  - ilovecaching 4y ago
    It’s literally OCI compatible, integrates with systemd and LSM, and runs rootless by default. Podman is 100000% better designed on the inside with the same interface on the outside.
    - dontlaugh 4y ago
      It’s the lack of fully compatible compose that matters most.
      - jacooper 4y ago
        Podman appears to support the compose v2 spec, and the socket API, but still not fully supporting buildkit. https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-compose-docker-compose https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-compose-docker-compos...
    - jacooper 4y ago
      Rootless networking is still a mess with no IP source propagation and much slower performance. So for most users docker with userNS-remapping is actually a better choice. Also systemd integration isn't a plus for me, I don't want to deal with SystemD just to have a container start on startup.
      - yrro 4y ago
        I think --network=pasta: helps with source IP preservation. Regardless that has never bothered me since I'm only using podman or docker for local development...
        jacooper 4y ago
        Hmmm, pasta seems to solve all rootless networking issues... https://github.com/containers/podman/pull/16141 https://github.com/containers/podman/pull/16141
- raesene9 4y ago
  This is more about Docker hub than Docker. Image hosting is expensive at scale, and someone's got to pay for the compute/storage/network...
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    I agree. The core devs should create a new company and focus just on the tools, with a simple, scaling licence model for them. As far as DockerHub goes, the OSS hosting costs do need to be solved, but surely they can be.
    - raesene9 4y ago
      I'm not sure it's easy. We're seeing other open source projects like Kubernetes struggle with hosting costs, and that's just one project. Ideally it'd be great to see the industry fund it, but with budget cuts in tech. I'm not sure that'll happen...
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        I haven't seen that, but I haven't been following along. I'd assumed they would be very Google-funded still. Is it a general CNCF problem?
        raesene9 4y ago
        So I'm not in the details of this but I understand from k8s slack that there is a fixed GCP budget for image hosting and Kubernetes is getting through it too quickly which is why they're moving the registry domain to a generic one from a GCP specific one, to allow for other funding to be found and used.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    >> Image hosting is expensive at scale, and someone's got to pay for the compute/storage/network.. Bit Torrent would beg to differ.
- sofixa 4y ago
  How is a tool developed by, and strongly pushed by (to the point of strongarming customers to transition to their tool, features lacking be damned) a corporation, especially one owned by IBM, filling the role of a coop-developed tool?
londons_explore 4y ago
Docker should have been a neat tool made by one enthusiast, just like curl is. Instead it has a multi-million dollar company behind it, and VC's who demand profits from a thing that shouldn't have ever had a business plan.
- aviramha 4y ago
  I think that Docker can have a viable business plan but they had terrible execution. At my previous position, I wanted to use DockerHub more heavily but the entire experience was like a bootstrap project someone did as a university assignment. Many advanced features for organizations were lacking (SSO/SAML) that we would have happily paid for.
  - MandieD 4y ago
    That, plus not being willing to accept Purchase Orders, doomed them with my employer. It's as if they had no idea how things work at large enterprises that are older than most Docker employees.
- pydry 4y ago
  I think they potentially could have made a decent business out of it but they made a lot of bad business decisions. I find myself shaking my head at a lot of their technical decisions too. Podman seems to me to be a case study for how to do this right.
  - aviramha 4y ago
    I am usually an early adopter but I keep coming back to Docker since Podman is still very rough around the edges, especially in terms of "non-direct" usage (aka other tools)
    - vladvasiliu 4y ago
      As someone who's been bitten by this, I'm not sure if it's an issue with podman itself as much as the tools which expect docker. It could be argued that podman is not a docker drop-in replacement, but I expect more and more tools to pick it up.
bydlocoder 4y ago
A co-op formed by big 3 cloud providers flush with cash and put in maintenance mode.
pmarreck 4y ago
> worlds better than the old ways of managing dependencies and making sure everyone on a project is aligned on what versions of things are installed. And Nix is worlds better than even this. Imagine!
- jon-wood 4y ago
  I’m yet to be entirely sold on that, mostly because I think Nix the language isn’t anywhere near as accessible as Dockerfiles, but I’ll be the first one cheering if Nix does manage to take over.
  - archseer 4y ago
    https://www.mpscholten.de/docker/2016/01/27/you-are-most-likely-misusing-docker.html https://www.mpscholten.de/docker/2016/01/27/you-are-most-lik...
  - pmarreck 4y ago
    Completely agree on the complexity criticism, but this interactive tutorial (that literally embeds a full nix interpreter in the browser) went a looooooong way towards making Nix files not just look like arcane incantations to me, and doesn't take very long to do: https://nixcloud.io/tour/ https://nixcloud.io/tour/ if at some point you realize "oh... this is just JSON with a different syntax, some shorthands, and anonymous or library functions," you're on the right path
  - jljljl 4y ago
    You might be interested in Devbox (http://jetpack.io/devbox http://jetpack.io/devbox)! We built Devbox because we were frustrated with our Docker based dev environments, and our goal is to provide the power of Nix with a more accessible interface (similar to yarn or other package managers). We're open source and rapidly adding features, you can check us out on Github at https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox
- djbusby 4y ago
  How to run Nix on Gentoo and Debian?
timcobb 4y ago
> Unfortunately Docker the company appears to be dying Docker the company is crushing 2022-2023… record revenue and earnings
- tyingq 4y ago
  Of course, I can do a lot of record revenue and earnings selling five dollar bills for $4. I'm curious what a path to profit would look like...is this kind of squeeze the only way to get there?
  - anonymoushn 4y ago
    that would make you negative one dollar of earnings per sale
    - tyingq 4y ago
      I agree given the usual definition of "net earnings", but private companies often represent earnings in creative ways that exclude obvious costs (hey Uber!).
    - windexh8er 4y ago
      OPs point is that revenue is easy, profit is not.
    - cratermoon 4y ago
      unless you use dotcom accounting, in which case you can say that you lose money on every sale, but make up for it in volume.
    - ehutch79 4y ago
      But 4$ of revenue! Do that 1000x and think of the growth!
  - mfer 4y ago
    Docker Hub is a massive expense when you consider the data storage and egress. To do that for open source projects you have to wither (a) have a lot of income to cover such an expense, (b) a pile of VC funding to cover the expense, or (c) pile on the debt paying for it while you grow. (b) and (c) can only live on so long.
osigurdson 4y ago
I'd like to see Docker succeed. They invented / formalized the space and deserve credit for that. They are probably doing the right thing with some of their development tooling (though maybe that should just be spun off to Microsoft) and ensuring images do not contain badware is something companies will pay for. However, their core offering must be the leader if they want to survive. Devs must want to use "docker run" instead of "podman run" for example. Docker needs to be the obvious #1 for starting a container on a single machine.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  > their core offering must be the leader if they want to survive. Devs must want to use "docker run" instead of "podman run" If their core offering is container hosting, they should be able to make a company out of that even without the client. After all jfrog and cloudsmith are more per less just that, as is github.
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    Docker's core offering is docker (obviously), but that doesn't have to be the piece that is monetized.
- gorjusborg 4y ago
  > I'd like to see Docker succeed. They invented / formalized the space and deserve credit for that. If by succeed, you mean they deserve to have revenue, I disagree. They spun some cool work out of dotCloud when it failed. They seemed to delay thinking about how they'd monetize the work, and sort of fell into charging for developer tooling after their orchestration play lost to kubernetes. At this point, I think of Docker the company as a wannabe Oracle. They are desperate for money, and are hoping they can fool you into adopting their tech so they can ransom it from you once you rely on it. If that sounds appealing to you, I'd say go for it. For me, that situation seems worse than what I do without containers at my disposal. In other words, the solution is worse overall than the problem.
  - nickstinemates 4y ago
throwawaymanbot 4y ago
[dead]
voytec 4y ago
> they can't work out how to build a business around what is at it's core a nice UI for Linux containers. It's quite a shame (for the lack of better wording) that the better, simpler and more intuitive a free product is, the harder it is to make money from it by selling support. I think that the best way to go from here, would be building companion products and supporting the whole ecosystem. By companion products, I mean other standalone apps/services, not just GUI for existing one.
pjmlp 4y ago
It packaged containers that we already knew from other UNIX and mainframe/micros systems.
- never_inline 4y ago
  Sir computers nothing but we already known from Alen Turing.
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
> Unfortunately Docker the company appears to be dying, this is the latest in a long line of decisions that are clearly being made because they can't work out how to build a business around what is at it's core a nice UI for Linux containers. It should have been just a small company, doing this, and making some money for their trouble instead of whatever it is they're trying to be.
- usrusr 4y ago
  That might be possible for soemthing that "only" writes and distributes software (that can also work on levels of success much less stellar than sqlite), but when you try to pull off hosting services at internet scale like docker hub did, with some free tiers, it's just not feasible to include it all in the bills of user subset that is actually willing and able to pay. The playbook is always the same: "maybe we could do that high impact free tier if we had more funding?" and that "whatever it is they're trying to be" is an implicit consequence of that, that ambition comes with the funding. "just a small company" mean bootstrapped, and bulk hosting like docker hub would simply not happen.
user3939382 4y ago
I'd like to see something resembling the Linux model. In the case of Docker, a foundation built around a suite of open source tools that's contributed to by pledges from all the big companies that use the tool. Maybe that means podman has a reliable source of funds for maintenance and improvement. What I don't like is having these critical tools directly in the hands of a single for-profit corporation, at least where it can be avoided.
- Pet_Ant 4y ago
  If we want that I feel like there should be a community buy out. Just so that they have something to return to investors. Just so that they have incentive to play nice and not Hudson-up the process. You shouldn't be able to build a critical piece of infrastructure and have nothing to show for it. Community buy-out should be a viable exit plan.
Iolaum 4y ago
Does that mean it would be a good idea to start moving to the podman ecosystem? RedHat/IBM seem to have this figured out better. I m doing that personally but I m very hesitant about mentioning that to $job.
msla 4y ago
> My hope is that before the inevitable shuttering of Docker Inc another organisations (ideally a coop of some variety, but that's probably wishful thinking) Indeed. We should all be equal in that venture: Ain't nobody here but us chickens.
rendaw 4y ago
Why didn't Docker ever offer managed container hosting? That seems like the obvious logical next step when you create a tool for easy deploys. Instead it's 2023 and we finally get that with Fly.io. I must be missing something obvious, because otherwise I feel like I'm going insane.
- nickstinemates 4y ago
  They did[1]. It was later shut down. 1: https://venturebeat.com/business/docker-acquires-container-deployment-startup-tutum/ https://venturebeat.com/business/docker-acquires-container-d...
  - rendaw 4y ago
    Per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10425097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10425097 > Tutum is not a real PaaS, it runs containers in the user infrastructure and can be easily adapted to run on-premise Which doesn't sound like managed container hosting to me. Their site is gone though so I'm not really sure. There was 0 discussion around their shutdown, if they did have a managed solution I'm curious why it failed. Too early?
    - nickstinemates 4y ago
      All references to it are redirects now, but here's a HN discussion on the topic[1]. Here's the content on the wayback machine[2] 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16665130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16665130 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180328234733/https://docs.docker.com/docker-cloud/migration/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180328234733/https://docs.dock...
      - rendaw 4y ago
        Thanks for the link -- neither of those explain what Docker Cloud (nee Tutum) is but https://web.archive.org/web/20171003123425/https://docs.docker.com/docker-cloud/ https://web.archive.org/web/20171003123425/https://docs.dock... has a bit more info. > Docker Cloud provides ... tools to help you set up and manage host infrastructure additionally > When you use Docker Cloud to deploy nodes on a hosted provider, the service stores your cloud provider credentials and then deploys nodes for you using the services’ API to perform actions on your behalf. That sounds like not managed to me if you're managing the underlying infra, the IaaS, IAM connections, needing to watch host to container ratios, etc. but I guess host maintenance was limited to pressing a button to upgrade (with downtime) hosts at least.
college_physics 4y ago
Can't comment specifically on this or that "dying company", but it is a bit disappointing that after, how many, four decades of open source? and the obvious utility of that paradigm, it still seems a major challenge to build sustainable open source ecosystems. This means we can't really move on and imagine grander things that might build on top of each other. Its not clear if that is due to: i) competition from proprietary business models ii) more specifically the excessive concentration of said proprietary business models ("big tech") iii) confusion from conflicting objectives and monetisation incentives (the various types of licenses etc) iv) ill-adapted funding models (venture capital) v) intrinsic to the concept and there is no solution vi) just not having matured yet enough What I am driving at is that building more complex structures requires some solid foundations and those typically require building blocks following some proven blueprint. Somehow much around open source is still precarious and made up. Ideally you'd want to walk into the chamber of commerce (or maybe the chamber of open source entities), pick a name, a legal entity type, a sector and get going. You focus on your solutions, not on how to survive in a world that doesn't quite know what to make of you. Now, corporate structures and capital markets etc took hundreds of years to settle (and are still flawed in many ways) but we do live in accelerated times so maybe its just a matter of getting our act together?
- trasz3 4y ago
  It's because the incentives to make money quickly end up being stronger than incentives to build a sustainable open source ecosystems.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  It's still doing better than it could be. Big tech companies have played way nicer than they had to, focusing more on vague long-term presence than on immediate profits, and imo continue to do so to a lesser extent. There always comes a point when the innovation is done and they lock things down again, but even then they have to fight their own employees.
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  With lots of open source licenses, there is no copyleft. Without copyleft, for profit companies can simply take the hard work, add a little on top, make it proprietary, and sell it. Customer mentality is to use the most comfortable thing, without paying attention on whom they depend, often choosing the proprietary offer, because of feature X. There are healthy ecosystems, even some partially replacing docker, some with more daily updates than I can process, but they have copyleft licenses in place and are free software, to ensure contributions flow back. Companies can still make profit, but not from adding a minimalistic thing and making it proprietary. They need to find other ways.
hot_gril 4y ago
First time I saw Docker, I thought "that's great, but how do they make money?" They're selling a cloud containers service while also giving the software away to their direct competitors for free. Maybe I was too ignorant to understand their business model? But now I'm thinking I was right.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
So.... podman? No, I don't work for redhat. I'm glad a ... ?less? corporate entity / ?more? open source entity has pretty much gotten a replacement up.
alerighi 4y ago
To me is the opposite, Docker promotes bad software development practices that in the end will hurt you. In fact most of the time when you hear that you need Docker to run a software is because that software is so badly written that installing it on a system is too much complex. Another bad use of Docker that I've seen is because people cannot figure out how to write systemd units, that is damn simple (just spend a day to read the documentation and learn the tools that you need). Of course that makes administering the system so much complex because you cannot use the benefits that systemd will give you (thus you start using iperoverengineered tools like kubernetes to just run a webserver and a database...). I'm maybe oldschool but i use Dockers as a last resort, and prefer to have all the software installed properly on a server, with the use of Ansible as a configuration management tool. To me a system that uses Docker containers is much more difficult to manage in the long run, while a system that doesn't use it is more simple, thus less things that will break, thus if I need to make a fix in 10 years I ssh in the system, edit the program with vim, rebuild and restart the service, no complex deploy pipeline that break, depend on external sources that may be taken down (as is the case) and similar stuff.
- orf 4y ago
  I think you are letting your specific feelings and head-canon about purity be mistaken for solid technical arguments. If you’re sshing to boxes, editing things by hand and slinging ad-hoc commands around then your frame of reference is so far away from understanding it’s value proposition that it’s probably pointless to discuss it.
  - realjhol 4y ago
    Nix solves the ad-hoc problem much more cleanly than Dockerfiles do
    - orf 4y ago
      There’s purity of design/implementation and there’s usage. Often these are inversely related. I like nix - it’s probably the right direction, but just compare the UX to Docker. Comparatively Docker absolutely nailed it.
6nf 4y ago
Docker was always ‘oh we have too many moving parts in the deployment pipeline, let’s add Yet Another Thing. That will fix it’ It never fixed anything.

frognumber 4y ago

Do you remember SCO?

emeraldd 4y ago
Honestly, this is reminding me of Oracle after buying Sun.

spicyusername 4y ago

ideally a coop of some variety This is the role I feel like podman, the tool developed by Red Hat, is filling.

quaintdev 4y ago
Podman is great and is first class citizen on Fedora. It also integrates nicely with SystemD. My only gripe with it is not many developers provide podman configuration on their install pages like they do with docker compose
- regularfry 4y ago
  I'm using docker-compose with a podman VM for development on a mac. Works ok so far. It wasn't quite slick enough when Docker pulled the licence switch last year, but the experience in the last couple of months has been pretty painless.
- majewsky 4y ago
  Tangent: Why is the misspelling "SystemD" so common, when it has always been "systemd"? I would understand "Systemd" or "SYSTEMD" or something, but why specifically this weird spelling?
  - microtonal 4y ago
    People not familiar with tacking on a lowercased ‘d’ to the name for daemons?
  - robohoe 4y ago
    Probably to specifically call it out as "systemd" versus autocorrected misspelling of "systems".
  - kachnuv_ocasek 4y ago
    I've always thought of it as in analogy to System V.
    - cosmojg 4y ago
      Nah, it's French. > System D is a manner of responding to challenges that require one to have the ability to think quickly, to adapt, and to improvise when getting a job done. > The term is a direct translation of French Système D. The letter D refers to any one of the French nouns débrouille, débrouillardise or démerde (French slang). The verbs se débrouiller and se démerder mean to make do, to manage, especially in an adverse situation. Basically, it refers to one's ability and need to be resourceful. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_D
    - yrro 4y ago
jacooper 4y ago
Its not as easy nor as simple as docker + docker compose.
- ilovecaching 4y ago
  It’s literally OCI compatible, integrates with systemd and LSM, and runs rootless by default. Podman is 100000% better designed on the inside with the same interface on the outside.
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    It’s the lack of fully compatible compose that matters most.
    - jacooper 4y ago
      Podman appears to support the compose v2 spec, and the socket API, but still not fully supporting buildkit. https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-compose-docker-compose https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-compose-docker-compos...
  - jacooper 4y ago
    Rootless networking is still a mess with no IP source propagation and much slower performance. So for most users docker with userNS-remapping is actually a better choice. Also systemd integration isn't a plus for me, I don't want to deal with SystemD just to have a container start on startup.
    - yrro 4y ago
      I think --network=pasta: helps with source IP preservation. Regardless that has never bothered me since I'm only using podman or docker for local development...
      - jacooper 4y ago
        Hmmm, pasta seems to solve all rootless networking issues... https://github.com/containers/podman/pull/16141 https://github.com/containers/podman/pull/16141
raesene9 4y ago
This is more about Docker hub than Docker. Image hosting is expensive at scale, and someone's got to pay for the compute/storage/network...
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I agree. The core devs should create a new company and focus just on the tools, with a simple, scaling licence model for them. As far as DockerHub goes, the OSS hosting costs do need to be solved, but surely they can be.
  - raesene9 4y ago
    I'm not sure it's easy. We're seeing other open source projects like Kubernetes struggle with hosting costs, and that's just one project. Ideally it'd be great to see the industry fund it, but with budget cuts in tech. I'm not sure that'll happen...
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      I haven't seen that, but I haven't been following along. I'd assumed they would be very Google-funded still. Is it a general CNCF problem?
      - raesene9 4y ago
        So I'm not in the details of this but I understand from k8s slack that there is a fixed GCP budget for image hosting and Kubernetes is getting through it too quickly which is why they're moving the registry domain to a generic one from a GCP specific one, to allow for other funding to be found and used.
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> Image hosting is expensive at scale, and someone's got to pay for the compute/storage/network.. Bit Torrent would beg to differ.
sofixa 4y ago
How is a tool developed by, and strongly pushed by (to the point of strongarming customers to transition to their tool, features lacking be damned) a corporation, especially one owned by IBM, filling the role of a coop-developed tool?

londons_explore 4y ago

Docker should have been a neat tool made by one enthusiast, just like curl is. Instead it has a multi-million dollar company behind it, and VC's who demand profits from a thing that shouldn't have ever had a business plan.

aviramha 4y ago
I think that Docker can have a viable business plan but they had terrible execution. At my previous position, I wanted to use DockerHub more heavily but the entire experience was like a bootstrap project someone did as a university assignment. Many advanced features for organizations were lacking (SSO/SAML) that we would have happily paid for.
- MandieD 4y ago
  That, plus not being willing to accept Purchase Orders, doomed them with my employer. It's as if they had no idea how things work at large enterprises that are older than most Docker employees.
pydry 4y ago
I think they potentially could have made a decent business out of it but they made a lot of bad business decisions. I find myself shaking my head at a lot of their technical decisions too. Podman seems to me to be a case study for how to do this right.
- aviramha 4y ago
  I am usually an early adopter but I keep coming back to Docker since Podman is still very rough around the edges, especially in terms of "non-direct" usage (aka other tools)
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    As someone who's been bitten by this, I'm not sure if it's an issue with podman itself as much as the tools which expect docker. It could be argued that podman is not a docker drop-in replacement, but I expect more and more tools to pick it up.

bydlocoder 4y ago

A co-op formed by big 3 cloud providers flush with cash and put in maintenance mode.

pmarreck 4y ago

> worlds better than the old ways of managing dependencies and making sure everyone on a project is aligned on what versions of things are installed. And Nix is worlds better than even this. Imagine!

jon-wood 4y ago
I’m yet to be entirely sold on that, mostly because I think Nix the language isn’t anywhere near as accessible as Dockerfiles, but I’ll be the first one cheering if Nix does manage to take over.
- archseer 4y ago
  https://www.mpscholten.de/docker/2016/01/27/you-are-most-likely-misusing-docker.html https://www.mpscholten.de/docker/2016/01/27/you-are-most-lik...
- pmarreck 4y ago
  Completely agree on the complexity criticism, but this interactive tutorial (that literally embeds a full nix interpreter in the browser) went a looooooong way towards making Nix files not just look like arcane incantations to me, and doesn't take very long to do: https://nixcloud.io/tour/ https://nixcloud.io/tour/ if at some point you realize "oh... this is just JSON with a different syntax, some shorthands, and anonymous or library functions," you're on the right path
- jljljl 4y ago
  You might be interested in Devbox (http://jetpack.io/devbox http://jetpack.io/devbox)! We built Devbox because we were frustrated with our Docker based dev environments, and our goal is to provide the power of Nix with a more accessible interface (similar to yarn or other package managers). We're open source and rapidly adding features, you can check us out on Github at https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox
djbusby 4y ago
How to run Nix on Gentoo and Debian?

timcobb 4y ago

> Unfortunately Docker the company appears to be dying Docker the company is crushing 2022-2023… record revenue and earnings

tyingq 4y ago
Of course, I can do a lot of record revenue and earnings selling five dollar bills for $4. I'm curious what a path to profit would look like...is this kind of squeeze the only way to get there?
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  that would make you negative one dollar of earnings per sale
  - tyingq 4y ago
    I agree given the usual definition of "net earnings", but private companies often represent earnings in creative ways that exclude obvious costs (hey Uber!).
  - windexh8er 4y ago
    OPs point is that revenue is easy, profit is not.
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    unless you use dotcom accounting, in which case you can say that you lose money on every sale, but make up for it in volume.
  - ehutch79 4y ago
    But 4$ of revenue! Do that 1000x and think of the growth!
- mfer 4y ago
  Docker Hub is a massive expense when you consider the data storage and egress. To do that for open source projects you have to wither (a) have a lot of income to cover such an expense, (b) a pile of VC funding to cover the expense, or (c) pile on the debt paying for it while you grow. (b) and (c) can only live on so long.

osigurdson 4y ago

I'd like to see Docker succeed. They invented / formalized the space and deserve credit for that. They are probably doing the right thing with some of their development tooling (though maybe that should just be spun off to Microsoft) and ensuring images do not contain badware is something companies will pay for. However, their core offering must be the leader if they want to survive. Devs must want to use "docker run" instead of "podman run" for example. Docker needs to be the obvious #1 for starting a container on a single machine.

wongarsu 4y ago
> their core offering must be the leader if they want to survive. Devs must want to use "docker run" instead of "podman run" If their core offering is container hosting, they should be able to make a company out of that even without the client. After all jfrog and cloudsmith are more per less just that, as is github.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  Docker's core offering is docker (obviously), but that doesn't have to be the piece that is monetized.
gorjusborg 4y ago
> I'd like to see Docker succeed. They invented / formalized the space and deserve credit for that. If by succeed, you mean they deserve to have revenue, I disagree. They spun some cool work out of dotCloud when it failed. They seemed to delay thinking about how they'd monetize the work, and sort of fell into charging for developer tooling after their orchestration play lost to kubernetes. At this point, I think of Docker the company as a wannabe Oracle. They are desperate for money, and are hoping they can fool you into adopting their tech so they can ransom it from you once you rely on it. If that sounds appealing to you, I'd say go for it. For me, that situation seems worse than what I do without containers at my disposal. In other words, the solution is worse overall than the problem.
- nickstinemates 4y ago

throwawaymanbot 4y ago

[dead]

voytec 4y ago

> they can't work out how to build a business around what is at it's core a nice UI for Linux containers. It's quite a shame (for the lack of better wording) that the better, simpler and more intuitive a free product is, the harder it is to make money from it by selling support. I think that the best way to go from here, would be building companion products and supporting the whole ecosystem. By companion products, I mean other standalone apps/services, not just GUI for existing one.

pjmlp 4y ago

It packaged containers that we already knew from other UNIX and mainframe/micros systems.

never_inline 4y ago
Sir computers nothing but we already known from Alen Turing.

JustSomeNobody 4y ago

> Unfortunately Docker the company appears to be dying, this is the latest in a long line of decisions that are clearly being made because they can't work out how to build a business around what is at it's core a nice UI for Linux containers. It should have been just a small company, doing this, and making some money for their trouble instead of whatever it is they're trying to be.

usrusr 4y ago
That might be possible for soemthing that "only" writes and distributes software (that can also work on levels of success much less stellar than sqlite), but when you try to pull off hosting services at internet scale like docker hub did, with some free tiers, it's just not feasible to include it all in the bills of user subset that is actually willing and able to pay. The playbook is always the same: "maybe we could do that high impact free tier if we had more funding?" and that "whatever it is they're trying to be" is an implicit consequence of that, that ambition comes with the funding. "just a small company" mean bootstrapped, and bulk hosting like docker hub would simply not happen.

user3939382 4y ago

I'd like to see something resembling the Linux model. In the case of Docker, a foundation built around a suite of open source tools that's contributed to by pledges from all the big companies that use the tool. Maybe that means podman has a reliable source of funds for maintenance and improvement. What I don't like is having these critical tools directly in the hands of a single for-profit corporation, at least where it can be avoided.

Pet_Ant 4y ago
If we want that I feel like there should be a community buy out. Just so that they have something to return to investors. Just so that they have incentive to play nice and not Hudson-up the process. You shouldn't be able to build a critical piece of infrastructure and have nothing to show for it. Community buy-out should be a viable exit plan.

Iolaum 4y ago

Does that mean it would be a good idea to start moving to the podman ecosystem? RedHat/IBM seem to have this figured out better. I m doing that personally but I m very hesitant about mentioning that to $job.

msla 4y ago

> My hope is that before the inevitable shuttering of Docker Inc another organisations (ideally a coop of some variety, but that's probably wishful thinking) Indeed. We should all be equal in that venture: Ain't nobody here but us chickens.

rendaw 4y ago

Why didn't Docker ever offer managed container hosting? That seems like the obvious logical next step when you create a tool for easy deploys. Instead it's 2023 and we finally get that with Fly.io. I must be missing something obvious, because otherwise I feel like I'm going insane.

nickstinemates 4y ago
They did[1]. It was later shut down. 1: https://venturebeat.com/business/docker-acquires-container-deployment-startup-tutum/ https://venturebeat.com/business/docker-acquires-container-d...
- rendaw 4y ago
  Per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10425097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10425097 > Tutum is not a real PaaS, it runs containers in the user infrastructure and can be easily adapted to run on-premise Which doesn't sound like managed container hosting to me. Their site is gone though so I'm not really sure. There was 0 discussion around their shutdown, if they did have a managed solution I'm curious why it failed. Too early?
  - nickstinemates 4y ago
    All references to it are redirects now, but here's a HN discussion on the topic[1]. Here's the content on the wayback machine[2] 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16665130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16665130 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180328234733/https://docs.docker.com/docker-cloud/migration/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180328234733/https://docs.dock...
    - rendaw 4y ago
      Thanks for the link -- neither of those explain what Docker Cloud (nee Tutum) is but https://web.archive.org/web/20171003123425/https://docs.docker.com/docker-cloud/ https://web.archive.org/web/20171003123425/https://docs.dock... has a bit more info. > Docker Cloud provides ... tools to help you set up and manage host infrastructure additionally > When you use Docker Cloud to deploy nodes on a hosted provider, the service stores your cloud provider credentials and then deploys nodes for you using the services’ API to perform actions on your behalf. That sounds like not managed to me if you're managing the underlying infra, the IaaS, IAM connections, needing to watch host to container ratios, etc. but I guess host maintenance was limited to pressing a button to upgrade (with downtime) hosts at least.

college_physics 4y ago

Can't comment specifically on this or that "dying company", but it is a bit disappointing that after, how many, four decades of open source? and the obvious utility of that paradigm, it still seems a major challenge to build sustainable open source ecosystems. This means we can't really move on and imagine grander things that might build on top of each other. Its not clear if that is due to: i) competition from proprietary business models ii) more specifically the excessive concentration of said proprietary business models ("big tech") iii) confusion from conflicting objectives and monetisation incentives (the various types of licenses etc) iv) ill-adapted funding models (venture capital) v) intrinsic to the concept and there is no solution vi) just not having matured yet enough What I am driving at is that building more complex structures requires some solid foundations and those typically require building blocks following some proven blueprint. Somehow much around open source is still precarious and made up. Ideally you'd want to walk into the chamber of commerce (or maybe the chamber of open source entities), pick a name, a legal entity type, a sector and get going. You focus on your solutions, not on how to survive in a world that doesn't quite know what to make of you. Now, corporate structures and capital markets etc took hundreds of years to settle (and are still flawed in many ways) but we do live in accelerated times so maybe its just a matter of getting our act together?

trasz3 4y ago
It's because the incentives to make money quickly end up being stronger than incentives to build a sustainable open source ecosystems.
hot_gril 4y ago
It's still doing better than it could be. Big tech companies have played way nicer than they had to, focusing more on vague long-term presence than on immediate profits, and imo continue to do so to a lesser extent. There always comes a point when the innovation is done and they lock things down again, but even then they have to fight their own employees.
zelphirkalt 4y ago
With lots of open source licenses, there is no copyleft. Without copyleft, for profit companies can simply take the hard work, add a little on top, make it proprietary, and sell it. Customer mentality is to use the most comfortable thing, without paying attention on whom they depend, often choosing the proprietary offer, because of feature X. There are healthy ecosystems, even some partially replacing docker, some with more daily updates than I can process, but they have copyleft licenses in place and are free software, to ensure contributions flow back. Companies can still make profit, but not from adding a minimalistic thing and making it proprietary. They need to find other ways.

hot_gril 4y ago

First time I saw Docker, I thought "that's great, but how do they make money?" They're selling a cloud containers service while also giving the software away to their direct competitors for free. Maybe I was too ignorant to understand their business model? But now I'm thinking I was right.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

So.... podman? No, I don't work for redhat. I'm glad a ... ?less? corporate entity / ?more? open source entity has pretty much gotten a replacement up.

alerighi 4y ago

To me is the opposite, Docker promotes bad software development practices that in the end will hurt you. In fact most of the time when you hear that you need Docker to run a software is because that software is so badly written that installing it on a system is too much complex. Another bad use of Docker that I've seen is because people cannot figure out how to write systemd units, that is damn simple (just spend a day to read the documentation and learn the tools that you need). Of course that makes administering the system so much complex because you cannot use the benefits that systemd will give you (thus you start using iperoverengineered tools like kubernetes to just run a webserver and a database...). I'm maybe oldschool but i use Dockers as a last resort, and prefer to have all the software installed properly on a server, with the use of Ansible as a configuration management tool. To me a system that uses Docker containers is much more difficult to manage in the long run, while a system that doesn't use it is more simple, thus less things that will break, thus if I need to make a fix in 10 years I ssh in the system, edit the program with vim, rebuild and restart the service, no complex deploy pipeline that break, depend on external sources that may be taken down (as is the case) and similar stuff.

orf 4y ago
I think you are letting your specific feelings and head-canon about purity be mistaken for solid technical arguments. If you’re sshing to boxes, editing things by hand and slinging ad-hoc commands around then your frame of reference is so far away from understanding it’s value proposition that it’s probably pointless to discuss it.
- realjhol 4y ago
  Nix solves the ad-hoc problem much more cleanly than Dockerfiles do
  - orf 4y ago
    There’s purity of design/implementation and there’s usage. Often these are inversely related. I like nix - it’s probably the right direction, but just compare the UX to Docker. Comparatively Docker absolutely nailed it.

6nf 4y ago

Docker was always ‘oh we have too many moving parts in the deployment pipeline, let’s add Yet Another Thing. That will fix it’ It never fixed anything.