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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.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  That's a neat idea but probably unworkable in practice. Container images need to be reliably available quickly; there is no appetite for the uncertainties surrounding the average torrent download
  - nordsieck 4y ago
    > That's a neat idea but probably unworkable in practice. Container images need to be reliably available quickly; there is no appetite for the uncertainties surrounding the average torrent download Bittorrent seems to work quite well for linux isos, which are about the same size as containers, for obvious reasons. IMO, the big difference is that, with bittorrent, it's possible to very inexpensively add lots of semi-reliable bandwidth.
    - Karunamon 4y ago
      Nobody is going to accept worrying about whether the torrent has enough people seeding in the middle of a CI run. And your usual torrent download is an explicit action with an explicit client, how are people going to seed these images and why would they? And what about the long tail?
      - phkahler 4y ago
        Nobody needs to be seeding if only one download is active. You could self host an image at home on a Raspberry Pi and provide an image in a minute. Nobody's CI should be depending on an external download of that size.
        Karunamon 4y ago
        We are talking about replacing the docker hub and the like, what people "should" be doing and what happens in the real world are substantially different. If this hypothetical replacement can't serve basic existing use cases it is dead at the starting line.
      - 4y ago
justinclift 4y ago
While that's true, for the amount of network traffic they're likely moving around, I wonder where they're placing their servers. eg something like AWS with massive data transfer costs, vs something else like carefully placed dedicated/colocation servers at places which don't charge for bandwidth
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  If it's AWS, they've surely got a huge discount. No way they're paying 8+x normal big-fish CDN rates for transfer. At their scale, it would have easily been worth the effort to move to something cheaper than AWS long ago, or else to negotiate a far lower rate.
  - nickstinemates 4y ago
    It is on S3. keeb@hancock > [/home/keeb] dig +short hub.docker.com elb-default.us-east-1.aws.dckr.io. prodextdefblue-1cc5ls33lft-b42d79a68e9f190c.elb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com.
  - justinclift 4y ago
    > No way they're paying 8+x normal big-fish CDN rates for transfer. While you're probably right, I've seen dumber things happen so I wouldn't completely rule out the possibility. :wink:
yamtaddle 4y ago
Docker Hub's the part I care about the most. If I can't use it as a daemon-focused package manager that works more-or-less the same everywhere with minimal friction without having to learn or recall the particulars of whatever distro (hell, on my home server it even saves me from having to fuck with systemd) and with isolation so I can run a bunch of versions of anything, I'll probably just stop using it. Everything else about it is secondary to its role as the de facto universal package manager for open source server software, from my perspective. ... of course, this is exactly the kind of thing they don't want, because it costs money without making any—but I do wonder if this'll bite them in the ass, long-term, from loss of mindshare. Maybe building in some kind of transparent bandwidth-sharing scheme (bittorrent/DHT or whatever) would have been a better move. I'd enable it on my server at home, at least, provided I could easily set some limits to keep it from going too nuts.
notatoad 4y ago
image hosting is not that expensive at scale. i can put an image on ECR and pay for bandwidth and storage at what is really not very good rates, and it still comes out way cheaper than paying for what docker hub wants me to pay.

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.

Karunamon 4y ago
That's a neat idea but probably unworkable in practice. Container images need to be reliably available quickly; there is no appetite for the uncertainties surrounding the average torrent download
- nordsieck 4y ago
  > That's a neat idea but probably unworkable in practice. Container images need to be reliably available quickly; there is no appetite for the uncertainties surrounding the average torrent download Bittorrent seems to work quite well for linux isos, which are about the same size as containers, for obvious reasons. IMO, the big difference is that, with bittorrent, it's possible to very inexpensively add lots of semi-reliable bandwidth.
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    Nobody is going to accept worrying about whether the torrent has enough people seeding in the middle of a CI run. And your usual torrent download is an explicit action with an explicit client, how are people going to seed these images and why would they? And what about the long tail?
    - phkahler 4y ago
      Nobody needs to be seeding if only one download is active. You could self host an image at home on a Raspberry Pi and provide an image in a minute. Nobody's CI should be depending on an external download of that size.
      - Karunamon 4y ago
        We are talking about replacing the docker hub and the like, what people "should" be doing and what happens in the real world are substantially different. If this hypothetical replacement can't serve basic existing use cases it is dead at the starting line.
    - 4y ago

justinclift 4y ago

While that's true, for the amount of network traffic they're likely moving around, I wonder where they're placing their servers. eg something like AWS with massive data transfer costs, vs something else like carefully placed dedicated/colocation servers at places which don't charge for bandwidth

yamtaddle 4y ago
If it's AWS, they've surely got a huge discount. No way they're paying 8+x normal big-fish CDN rates for transfer. At their scale, it would have easily been worth the effort to move to something cheaper than AWS long ago, or else to negotiate a far lower rate.
- nickstinemates 4y ago
  It is on S3. keeb@hancock > [/home/keeb] dig +short hub.docker.com elb-default.us-east-1.aws.dckr.io. prodextdefblue-1cc5ls33lft-b42d79a68e9f190c.elb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com.
- justinclift 4y ago
  > No way they're paying 8+x normal big-fish CDN rates for transfer. While you're probably right, I've seen dumber things happen so I wouldn't completely rule out the possibility. :wink:

yamtaddle 4y ago

Docker Hub's the part I care about the most. If I can't use it as a daemon-focused package manager that works more-or-less the same everywhere with minimal friction without having to learn or recall the particulars of whatever distro (hell, on my home server it even saves me from having to fuck with systemd) and with isolation so I can run a bunch of versions of anything, I'll probably just stop using it. Everything else about it is secondary to its role as the de facto universal package manager for open source server software, from my perspective. ... of course, this is exactly the kind of thing they don't want, because it costs money without making any—but I do wonder if this'll bite them in the ass, long-term, from loss of mindshare. Maybe building in some kind of transparent bandwidth-sharing scheme (bittorrent/DHT or whatever) would have been a better move. I'd enable it on my server at home, at least, provided I could easily set some limits to keep it from going too nuts.

notatoad 4y ago

image hosting is not that expensive at scale. i can put an image on ECR and pay for bandwidth and storage at what is really not very good rates, and it still comes out way cheaper than paying for what docker hub wants me to pay.