alt Hacker NewsWhat has Docker become?
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One thing that really hurt them from my PoV was how they acted when they changed their licensing structure with respect to revenue generating companies. I’m fine with the idea that licensing Docker and Docker Desktop is a good thing to do. However, I think they just made people distrust their motives with their approached to this.
At two places I worked their reps reached out to essentially ensnare the company in a sort of “gotcha” scheme where if we were running the version of Docker Desktop after the commercial licensing requirement change, they sent a 30 day notice to license the product or they’d sue. Due to the usual “mid size software company not micromanaging the developers” standard, we had a few people on a new enough version that it would trigger the new license terms and we were in violation. They didn’t seem to do much outreach other than threatening us.
So in each case we switched to Rancher Desktop.
The licensing cost wasn’t that high, but it was hard to take them in good faith after their approach.
It's a config DSL for a config DSL (OS files). Docker isn't much different from an AI wrapper. What was this mighty corporate machine supposed to become shipping config scripts?
The team I was before Docker got popular just used the OG container, user accounts, and set up namespaces and cgroups per user.
Docker represents perfectly the issue with the software industry; it is software that duplicates existing software chasing "line go up" not actual utility. No net new utility just different semantics to perform sys admin work.
Developers did not want to learn sys admin, and instead learned a meta-Docker-driven-sysadmin anyway.
> Docker’s journey reads like a startup trying to find product-market fit, except Docker already had product-market fit
Strongly disagree. The core Docker technology was an excellent product and as the article says, had a massive impact on the industry. But they never found a market for that technology at any price point that wasn't ~free, so they didn't have PMF. That technology also only took off in the way it did because it was free and open source.
Seems like (according to the author) whatever docker is doing it is a sign of their immediate demise and everyone on HN is cheering for the company to go down in flames no matter what.
The tech is open source and free forever - thats somehow a problem? The company monitised enterprise features, while keeping core and hub free - also a problem? Is exploring AI tools, like everyone else is? should they not? should they just stay stagnant? Has made hardened images free instead of making that a premium feature only for people in banks? - and monitising SLAs, how is that a problem?
Docker is still maintaining the runtime on which orbstack, podman etc are all using, and all the cloud providers are using, but apparently at the same time Docker is deeply irrelevant and should not make money - while all of us on HN with well paid tech jobs get to have high thoughts on their every move to pay their employees and investors...
Hi, I'm the founder of Docker. I started it in 2008 (under the name Dotcloud) and left in 2018.
AMA.
- well time to announce DockerVM, a super fast under 100ms boot time competitor to firecracker and gvisor and try selling this to some of the cloud providers out there
- take advantage of the current agentic wave and announce a Docker Sandbox runner product that lets you run agents inside cloud sandboxes
We use swarm in production and love it. K8s is extreme overkill for a high percentage of most of the shops who are using it, in my estimation.
What I hate about docker and other such solutions is that I cannot install it as nonroot user, and that it keeps images between users in a database. I want to move things around using mv and cp, and not have another management layer that I need to be aware of and that can end up in an inconsistent state.
If somebody missed it, apple/container is a good replacement for Docker for Mac on macOS. I have been using it for the last 6 months, there are issues, but also team is actively developing it.
It's a good thing that the commons are cheap. Imagine where we would be if all electrical devices were still covered by patents related to electricity, all owned by one company.
I used to be very enthusiastic about docker compose, but I've been playing around with nix + process-compose lately and its pretty great. I can have k3s and tilt in there only when it's necessary--which it's usually not.
> For developers, this doesn’t change much. Docker containers will continue to work, and the open source nature of Docker means the technology will persist regardless of what happens to the company. But it’s worth watching how Docker Inc’s search for identity plays out - it could affect the ecosystem of tools and services built around containers.
Things will actually change quite a bit. First of all, millions of people depend on Docker Desktop, and Podman Desktop is (as everything from RedHat is) a poor replacement for it. And the Docker CLI and daemon power a huge amount of container technology; Podman is, again, quite a poor replacement. If these solutions go away, a large amount of business and technology is gonna get left in the lurch.
Second, most of the containerized world depends on Docker Hub. If that went away, actually a huge swath of businesses would just go hard-down, with no easy fix. I know a million HNers will be crying out about the evils of "centralization", but actually the issue is it's corporate-run rather than an open body. The architecture should have had mirrors built-in from the start, but even without mirrors, the company and all its investment and support going away is the bigger rug-pull.
The industry and ecosystem have this terribly human habit of rushing at the path-of-least-resistance. If we don't plan an intelligent, robust migration strategy away from Docker, we'll end up relying on something worse.
New cool tech is almost never a moat.
It will get a company started but if the tech has any success, that success is always replicable (even if the exact tech isn’t). IP protection is worthless and beside the point.
The only moat is the creativity of a company’s core staff when they spend a lot of time on valuable problems. Each thing they produce will grow, live, and die, but if the company has no pipeline it is doomed.
And VCs know this, which is why they want to pump startups up, and then cash out before they flop, even while founders talk about all the great things they can do next.
Naming your company after your one successful product is a pretty good sign of a limited lifespan.
> Docker’s journey reads like a startup trying to find product-market fit, except Docker already had product-market fit - they created the containerization standard that everyone uses. The problem is that Docker the technology became so successful that Docker the company struggled to monetize it. When your core product becomes commoditized and open source, you need to find new ways to add value.
I would argue the reverse: that Docker's value was itself the product-market fit. Docker the technology was commoditized and open-source almost from its genesis, because its technology had been built by Borg engineers at Google. It provided marginally more than ergonomics, but ergonomics was all it needed - the missing link between theory and practice.
Another year, another story written about the demise of Docker. This has been happening since before Kubernetes took off. My own take:
Docker had a choice of markets to go after, the enterprise market was being dominated by the hyperscalers pushing their own Kubernetes offerings. So they pivoted to focus on the developer tooling market. This is a hard market to make work, particularly since developers are very famous for not paying for tooling, but they appear to making a profit.
With Docker Hub, it's always been a challenge to limit how much that costs to run. And with more stuff being thrown in larger images, I don't want to see that monthly bill. The limits they added hurt, but also made a lot of people realize they should have been running their own mirror on-prem, if not only to better handle an upstream outage when us-east-1 has a bad day.
Everything else has been pushing into each of the various popular development markets, from AI, to offloading builds to the cloud, to Hardened Images. They release things for free when they need to keep up with the competition, and charge when enterprises will pay for it.
They've shifted their focus a lot over the years. My fear would be if they stayed stagnant, trying to extract rents without pushing into new offerings. So I'm not worried they'll fail this year, just like I wasn't worried any of the previous years when similar posts were made.
Reminds me a bit of stuff like curl - the importance of it and the monetization opportunities are out of sync. Tricky
Sorry off topic question but has Docker come up with a easy to use dev solution. I always end up with using Devcontainer: it solves the sandboxed, ready to use dev env.
But the actual experience with developing on VSCode with Dev Containers is not great. It's laggy and slow.
I switched to Podman on Windows and found it less laggy, and it works fine for local development. I'm sure I'm missing some features, but as Docker continues to struggle to generate revenue, the open-source option will be important to an increasingly large part of the industry.
FYI- If I was docker, I'd stand up some bare metal hosting (i.e., a Docker Cloud) designed around making it easier for novice developers to take containers and turn them into web applications, with a product similar to Supabase built around this cloud to let novice developers quickly prototype and launch apps without learning how to do deployments in more sophisticated clouds. Supabase and AI vibe coders pair well, but the hole in the market is vibe coders who want to launch a web app vibe coded but don't know how to deploy containers to the cloud without a steep learning curve. It keeps many vibe coders trapped in AIO vibe coding platforms like Lovable and AI Studio.
I just want to disable "Ask Gordon" in the sidebar. I don't want to see it. My brain works in weird ways. Whenever I see a name for the first time I attach that person to it.
Gordon is the character from Half Life.
Docker a piece of software. Don't anthropomorphize it.
A few times I've wondered, where would Docker Inc be today if Microsoft acquired them back in 2017?
Early 2017 was peak Docker and Docker Inc. Those were the days. Container hype was everywhere. Before moby. Before all the pivots.
Microsoft was embracing open source and the cloud. They were acquiring dev tools.
It was a missed opportunity for both companies.
> Docker created a standard so successful that it became infrastructure, and infrastructure is hard to monetize
Open infrastructure is hard to monetize. Old school robotics players have a playbook for this. You may or may not agree DBs are infra but Oracle has done well by capitalistic standards.
The reality is in our economy exploitation is a basic requirement. Nothing says a company providing porcelain for Linux kernel capabilities has a right to exist. What has turned into OCI is great. Docker desktop lost on Mac to Orb stack and friends (but I guess they have caught back up?) the article does make it clear they have tried hard to find a place to leverage rent and it probably is making enough for a 10-100 person company to be very comfortable but 500-1000 seems very over grown at this point.
Really should not have given up on Swarm just to come back to it. Kubernetes is over kill for so many people using it for a convenient deployment story.
For a while, Docker seemed to focus on developer experience.
My favorite thing about Docker is that it spawned Podman.
Honestly I reach for podman or `nix develop` any chance I get. What is the edge that docker provides these days?
I think this deserves a reframing: Docker is perhaps the greatest success story involving a massively invested tech company.
We got an amazing durable essential piece of software from someone investing billions of dollars.
Now, the fact that they didn't get their money back, well, who cares? Not me, it wasn't my money.
Sucks for them, maybe -- but that's far better than enshittification for everyone.
Switched to OrbStack in one prompt using Claude. It’s a night and day difference
Admittedly, on my infrastructure, Ive been de-dockerizing. Theres too many footguns and little gotchas, and they all add up.
For example, sharing a graphics card, say a Intel A380 and Jellyfin, over docker is a TERRIBLE experience.
But the same, with a full VM, and the gfx card shared to it is easy peasy.
Now, for testing applications, docker is great. But when I decide to run a service, I'll de-dockerize OR single VM with docker inside, with cronjobs to once a week update.
And logging/monitoring is also a hell of a lot easier per machine, rather than 8 services through docker.
I'm sure if I need a full dynamic service fabric, sure go with Docker or K8s. But this is for personal and friend usage.
Why should a company be making money selling what is a essentially a thin layer of convenience over kernel features?
I truly do sometimes detest the open source community's often outright hostility towards monetization of software. People gotta eat.
I think what happened to docker is a bit unfortunate. March 2013 — Docker goes public/open source at PyCon Nov 2013 — Jerry Chen pursues Docker, leads to Greylock Series B - Jan 2014 — Greylock Series B closes ($15M) - June 2014 — Kubernetes announced - July 2015 — Kubernetes 1.0 released.
Jerry is a good friend of mine and I think a great VC, he comes from the VMware world and was part of building the VMware enterprise strategy. When all the container stuff was all going down, I was trying to understand how digialocean needed to play in the container space - so I spent a lot of time talking to people and trying to understand it (decided we basically...shouldn't, although looked at buying Hashi) - but it was clear at the time the docker team went with Jerry because they saw themselves either displacing VMware or doing a VMware style play - either way, we all watched them start the process of moving to a real enterprise footing out of just a pure play devtool in 2014, it might have worked too (although frankly their GTM motions were very very strange), but Kubernetes..yah. You might recall Flo was on the scene too selling his ideas at Mesosphere, and the wonderful Alex Polvi with CoreOS. It was certainly an interesting time, I think about that period often and that it is a bit of a shame what happened to docker. I like Solomon a lot and think he's a genuinely genius dude.
They enshittified/Dropboxified their core Docker Desktop app so much that OrbStack — I believe a single person initially — managed to build a better product. I love this outcome.
Superfluous!
Docker is only successful because of free software: the foss docker daemon, the foss docker cli client, and of course linux.
Docker tried to become a proprietary software company, which is rude and user-hostile.
I was a contractor code money at a place automating $3M/yr in labor. We reported to a senior that did little programming if at all. He was older than me but newer than myself to the company, I was happy to avoid meetings and code.
He'd always try to get us into various technologies, Docker was one of them. It wasn't really relevant for the job, but I could see its uses.
Now that I think about it, I don't think anything they did on the tech discovery front was useful. Got stuck on Confulence which required us to save as a .pdf for our users to view lmao. Credit for being super smart with coding, he was a wiz on code reviews.
"The problem is that Docker the technology became so successful that Docker the company struggled to monetize it. When your core product becomes commoditized and open source, you need to find new ways to add value."
No, everything was already open source, other had done it before too, they just made it in a way a lot of "normal" users could start with it, then they waited too long and others created better/their own products.
"Docker Swarm was Docker’s attempt to compete with Kubernetes in the orchestration space."
No, it never was intended like that. That some people build infra/business around it is something completely different, but swarm was never intended to be a kubernetes contender.
"If you’re giving away your security features for free, what are you selling?"
This, is what actually is going to cost their business, I'm extremely grateful for what they have done for us. But they didn't gave themselves a chance. Their behaviour has been more akin to a non-profit. Great for us, not so great for them in the long run.