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Docker Raises $95M Series D Round for Its Container Platform
- rmoriz 12y agoI'm really exited to see which business model will be chosen to get a ROI. Docker is very popular but since most existing enterprise vendors adopt or integrate it, I'm not yet convinced that Docker Inc has some unique assets to make money out of.
- bontoJR 12y agoI went to a couple of events where Docker was a topic in Europe, the general feeling is that the solution looks great, but every single time a speaker/organizer asks to raise a hand if using it in production, nobody does. I mean, it's definitely a technology having a momentum, but I still have to find someone that heavily used it in production.
- otterley 12y agoThat's because it isn't ready for production yet, and certainly not at scale. You're in for a world of hurt if you try to deploy hundreds of containers at once from a central registry. And there's not yet a way to bind containers to physical interfaces that DHCP themselves at runtime. Docker solves problems for developers, and soon it might solve problems in production. But for large deployments, that day is not today.
- piva00 12y agoWell, we're currently running 80+ instances in my company using Docker to deploy every app. I'm the responsible for the push to this Docker-only approach, given that we had a bunch of legacy apps that were running in Chef-managed nodes (that I've also implemented), so I don't think that it's a developers-only tool, it's already pretty mature and I've not yet run into requiring to bind a container to some physical interface or whatever, the virtual interface has been great thus far.
- otterley 12y agoHow large are your images? How long does it take you to fetch them from the registry? Binding to a physical interface is required if any of your apps will share port numbers on a host. If you don't have network ACLs that control traffic between VLANs, and you have a discovery service to manage rendezvous, then maybe you can get away without it. But many of us cannot.
- piva00 12y agoOur images range from 600MiB to 2GiB in general. When you say share port numbers what exactly are you referring to? App X listening to port M in eth0 and app Y listening to port M in eth1? We don't really have this use case so for us it has been pretty simple. I think that your use case is a lot more complex than ours or I'm misunderstanding some part, are you using bare metal servers in your own data center? I'm trying to grasp what's your architecture like so I can see what parallel can I make to ours.
- otterley 12y agoYou didn't mention how long deploys take. 2GiB x 80 servers = 160GiB; assuming a 1Gb/s interface on the repository, it'll take a minimum of 22 minutes for all the servers to get their new bits.
- piva00 12y agoNot every server runs the same applications, we mostly do deploys on 5-6 servers at a time, it takes around 3 minutes to deploy our biggest apps, most of them deploy in under 30 seconds.
- curun1r 12y agoThe nice part about Docker is the images are composed of layers, so you only have to re-download a layer when it changes. In practice, we pull all of our base layers when we bake our AMIs, so spinning up a new instance is pretty quick and each new deploy only has to update the top layer that contains our code. Honestly, the only issue when it comes to image size is the initial developer pull either when they onboard to a team or when they bork their boot2docker install (which, disturbingly, happens way too often).
- chimeracoder 12y ago> And there's not yet a way to bind containers to physical interfaces that DHCP themselves at runtime Sure there is. Systemd will actually do this for you. Docker recently eschewed LXC, and I'm still not sure I understand exactly why, but even after the move to libcontainer, systemd is capable of handling this.
- otterley 12y agoI thought we were talking about Docker, not systemd. systemd is pretty powerful, but you have to write the glue Docker is providing yourself. If you mean a scenario where Docker launches systemd, we don't do that. In my view Docker is just a packaging system; each container's pid 1 is the app we're deploying.
- chimeracoder 12y ago> If you mean a scenario where Docker launches systemd, we don't do that. In my view Docker is just a packaging system; each container's pid 1 is the app we're deploying. No, systemd is actually capable of running Docker containers directly (even without Docker). I definitely wouldn't recommend running systemd inside a container unless you're using systemd to launch the container (instead of Docker), since Docker doesn't handle init systems very well, whereas systemd has this built-in. Though you can also go with the one-app-process-per-container approach as well with systemd, which also works.
- otterley 12y agoIf you have any citations that describe how to make systemd run Docker containers without Docker, I'd like to see them.
- grosskur 12y agoStarting with systemd 219, you can download a Docker image from a registry with "machinectl pull-dkr", and run it with "machinectl start": http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/machinectl.html http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/machinectl.h...
- errordeveloper 12y agoThere is a lot community effort being put into Docker extensions to enable production use cases like what you have just mentioned.
- justincormack 12y agoIt is going through the same path that AWS did, people start with test and CI type work, then move towards production. Europe is behind Silicon Valley in terms of moving towards production.
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- csomar 12y agoI'm using it for a financial application in production. Granted I can go without it, but currently it makes lots of sense to use it since I need the ability to nicely handle dependencies. I'm using Grunt for handling the creation, destruction and running of the containers. Docker Compose didn't exist back then.
- ryanSrich 12y agoIt's a startup from San Francisco. They don't need to make money!
- otterley 12y agoI don't mean to be overly dismissive or anything, but what does Docker make that customers will pay for? This is an awful lot of money to throw at a company that doesn't have a business plan, let alone technology that can't be readily replicated.
- pg_is_a_butt 12y agoi don't mean to be overly dismissive or anything, but why do you assume investments are always about direct return through monetization? lots of heavily capitalized companies have sprung up on the shoulders of docker... it is in their interest to keep the company afloat to better the chances of the features they are asking for to be realized.
- ig1 12y agoFrom the article: "Among the respondents, Docker recorded the strongest buying intention score the researchers recorded in the six years they’ve run this survey. Messina also noted that about 50 percent of the companies in the current Docker Hub beta are Fortune 100 companies."
- otterley 12y agoAre those Fortune 100 companies purchasers of the Docker Hub service, or mere users? If such a company downloaded even a single Docker image from the Hub, does that count?
- kristianc 12y agoI assume by the "current Docker Hub beta" they're referring to Docker Hub Enterprise, so they'll have set up their own registries.
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- jay-saint 12y ago
- csomar 12y agoAmazing news. Decided 6 months ago to go with Docker (both in dev and in production) for a financial application. It was a risk, and I got lots of resistance from the other devs and the security expert on the project. Docker is simply amazing. I'm currently using Grunt to manage the images/containers, but Docker Compose will replace some of that in the future. That being said, here are what you should expect: 1. It's not a VM. What work in DEV will not work in PRODUCTION. Be ready for some nasty debugging. 2. It's better to use the same OS (e.g. Centos) for both DEV and PRODUCTION. 3. Image sizes are not really small. Docker is consuming around 4GB of space for 6 containers. 4. Sometimes it breaks. I just need to destroy the whole thing and start clean. But that's Grunt ReRerun. And it works nicely. 5. I can update the code base, data, the applications, the whole OSes structure with Grunt ReRun. Takes a couple minutes.
- vacri 12y agoI have similar experiences to what you listed... and it's why I'm going to be moving away from docker in the mid-future. That 'nasty debugging' consumes a ton of time. I'm probably going to head back to .debs. I see a place for docker, but not on my production servers. It consumes gobs of disk space in practice and requires a lot of hand-holding; an extra layer of stuff to work around and to debug. I was resistant to it at first as they'd just started using it in the company when I arrived, but the devs kept talking about how wow it was. Fast forward to today, and not a single dev has it installed on their machine. None of them are interested.
- zwischenzug 12y agoInteresting. What do they do now?
- vacri 12y agoGenerally what they were already doing, as only one or two actually installed docker in the first place. They use Gulp to manage their dev systems, but I'm not sure if they use any other tools.
- bliti 12y agoSince Docker is not ready to officially be used in production: - Those of you using it in production, how are you handling security? - How secure has Docker proven to be in general?
- brrt 12y agoWe are using docker in production. We have had many issues but none related to security. It's an interesting phrase: 'to officially be used in production'. Who is the official that officially signs docker to be ready? ;-)
- amouat 12y agoWell, Docker Inc called Docker production ready on the 1.0 release and took down all the "do not use in production" warnings.
- justincormack 12y agoContainers per se do not reduce security. Most of the security issues are related to other changes, eg if you switch from VMs to Docker you are removing the VMs that may have been providing security, thats not really a Docker issue per se. If you run stuff with increased privileges in containers (ie root, or some capabilities) then you may decrease security too, but your applications should not be doing this. You can argue that the docker daemon itself (which is a big monolithic process running as root) is a security issue (RedHat certainly do). You can also argue that it makes security processes harder, as you dont have workflows in place to audit containers, make sure they are updated etc, but thats a different issue.
- lclarkmichalek 12y agoEeehhh, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Docker containers, as of 1.6, do reduce security. Without user namespaces, container root is system root, and the number of images that run as container root is incredibly high (where they might otherwise be running as system non-root). 1.7 should change this, as we'll finally get user namespaces, though I don't know how many people will end up using them; let's hope they're on by default, I guess.
- fixxer 12y agoOK. I'm calling market top. Love docker, but to date I've given them zero dollars and do not anticipate that changing. The Microsoft strategy looks cloudy at best.
- mbrock 12y agoFor that to be more relevant, you might want to tell us what role you're speaking as, what you know about Docker's paid services and why you're uninterested, what other similar services you do pay for, etc.
- fixxer 12y agoMy role is data scientist for a venture backed marketing startup, but I also wrote/designed all the tech used for ETL and reporting. I use docker in production to sandbox models that are called by the client via a web app. I admin a private registry that is used by other groups at the company. All of this was free. Setting up a private registry takes about thirty minutes. Orchestration via ansible is also free. I'm "calling top" in the most cheeky way possible, so be need to get your back up. I love docker and use it heavily. It is a brilliant product, but the brilliance to me is also in the fact that you really don't need much else beyond the basics. And I realize that they are moving incredibly fast and there is potential to see something that will blow my mind and cause me to open my wallet. If you're an enterprise user coming from Microsoft world, maybe paying for docker services makes sense. I prefer to just take an hour and do it myself for the cost of infrastructure.
- fweespeech 12y agoAs someone who self hosts Dev, Git, etc. at a decent sized company...I wouldn't pay for Docker either. I get what they are trying to do but it honestly doesn't provide enough improvements over existing technology to be worth expending serious amounts of money on.
- viggity 12y agohe told me that the company still hasn’t spent most of its Series B funding yet They raised a $15M Series B that they haven't even burned through, and yet they've raised a $40M Series C and another $95M D round? That is crazy.
- dragonwriter 12y agoWhy is it crazy? If you expect to need a longer runway, it seems prudent to secure it before you are at the end of what you have.
- fweespeech 12y agoDocker is either going to find a way to be a major player in the VM/Container market or its going to crash and burn. Raising money when the VCs are willing to throw it at you is a good strategy when you know you'll burn through alot.
- darkarmani 12y ago> Raising money when the VCs are willing to throw it at you is a good strategy when you know you'll burn through alot. Yes. Doesn't it also indicate that you are giving a lot of the company up at the current valuation? ie: you are betting that a (near-term) future valuation is lower, so you want to lock in the money now.
- dragonwriter 12y ago> ie: you are betting that a (near-term) future valuation is lower, so you want to lock in the money now. Or, you know, you think the money now effects the long-term valuation such that, if the current owners are giving up x proportion of the company in the proposed round, with v0 as the anticipated future value of the company if the round doesn't happen and v1 as the anticipated future value if it does, the owners think that v0 < v1×(1-x)
- fweespeech 12y agoWell, you are hedging your bets. It is alot like buying a house imo.
- IgorPartola 12y agoIt seems to me that Docker is heading down the same path as MySQL, whether knowingly or not. Perhaps they are trying to get everyone on board, then sell to a BigCo a la Oracle, telling them "here's the whole Docker ecosystem, go ahead and extract money from it." Who is Docker's actual customer? The user or BigCo?
- mattmanser 12y agoI thought MySQL AB was already extracting money, and lots of it, when it sold? Like $100 million in revenue?
- sudobash 12y agoPlease explain to me the value of these articles, I understand that hacker news is run by capital venturous but I still feel that we got minimal value from just ogling at the absurd amount of money that the startups are getting.
- pbreit 12y agoDocker is a YC graduate so it makes sense for there to be extra interest here.
- nickleefly 12y agoI dont think people will put private application docker file on hub even with paid plan