Docker, the company, is such a sad story. They have such an impactful technology but completely failed to monetize it and lost multiple revenue streams to competitors. Shows how hard "open source companies" are. Others OSS companies have similar problems. It would be nice to find economic models where impact is correlated with revenue.
Agreed. Docker (actually, containers in general but docker tooling) made it so damn easy to get local, reproducible builds. It’s fantastic and made life so much easier for me professionally as a Software Engineer.
I remember the early days when Docker had just released, all devs were super excited but nobody had run containers “in production”. AFAIK I believe it was mesos that was used widely for orchestrating containers in production. Docker swarm/compose just took too long to get there and k8s just rapidly took over and became the standard.
I'm still rooting for them, specifically for Swarm which is a breath of fresh air for small and personal deployments. Though tooling around Kubernetes has improved in the last couple of years and it's much easier to get started now, the system still has a steep learning curve compared to Swarm.
cryptocurrencies are ruining hardware availability (both GPU and now storage devices), the environment and now free cloud services. When are we gonna admit it?
Too bad. IMO the big benefit of automated builds was that Docker Hub was linked the source repository and showed the original Dockerfile, so that one was able to more easily verify what exactly a Docker image contains (provided one trusts Docker to correctly build these automated builds).
Ironically, one of the results of this is that paying customers may not have access to as many open source base images.
For example, I maintain a Docker image that builds statically-linked Rust binaries for Linux. It includes static versions of several C dependencies. It's useful mostly because setting up cross-compilation is really tricky and the details change occasionally.
I've been keeping it up to date for many years, and it has about 750k downloads (which is pretty decent for a compile-time-only Rust image). I don't mind maintaining it as a volunteer service for people who use it. But there's a good chance that I'll simply retire it, and that any paying Docker customers will need to figure out how to cross-compile weird C libraries on their own.
I'm not complaining. Docker owes me nothing, and I can just build images for my own use.
I assume their free tier is (also) aimed at the open source community; thus providing images for open source software just got a bit harder and possibly costly.
If everyone and everything went paid-only, you'd see a lot less open source software get made. I may be ready to sink a bunch of time into that sorely-missing piece of software I know how to write, but I wouldn't be willing to throw a bunch of money in as well, and I'm sure lots of others would draw a line there.
Same thing with open-sourcing things created at work; it's a hard sell already, but with an ongoing financial commitment, not going to happen. So personally I'm very happy that lots companies still support this sort of thing with free services, and I really hope this kind of crypto cancer won't kill all of them eventually.
Do folks here have ideas of what will become the best place to host public Docker container images? Between this and the earlier changes to rate limit pulls, Docker Hub no longer seems like the ideal venue for reputable public images.
Should we look into implementing our own registry with AWS ECR or similar?
Interesting reaction. This could also be interpreted as making it _more_ reputable, by removing abuse and cruft, allowing engineering time to be focused on things that provide value to end users.
Sad. I was hoping for multi-arch support (for Free tier, I don't make money out of my opensource image), and got this instead.
I wish the company could eventually found a way to make more money. Kubernetes too heavy to run, while Docker Swarm is rather reasonable. I guess there is a market gap?(???)
GitHub's Container Registry has multi-platform support, and I haven't encountered any limits. I believe the same is true of Google's Container Registry. There's not much reason to sacrifice features to use Docker's own registry.
While it's a managed service with all the lock-in that goes with, but ECS seems to be a nice sweet spot of what you need from Kubernetes without the complexity.
My understanding is that it's totally feasible, but ends up being a game of cat-and-mouse (just like most security projects).
The question is whether or not it's worth the effort (for Dockerhub). If they were leading in their space, and had a successful business, then maybe, but in the current situation it would be a large investment in providing something for free.
Remember that this change only applies to the free plans, not to anyone paying.
Most likely not worth it. The product that is being impacted is free to begin with, so the more a company invests into it to building custom filters, the more net negative they are spending, and they are not helping customers (free or paying) either. (ie the cryptocurrency miners will never become paying customer, because they are exploiting the platform specifically because it's free, so building filters means spending money to filter out people who will never be customers anyway.)
I'd rather docker spend engineering time on improving their paid service to legitimate customers.
Normally, I would take this at face value. But from the company that just started charging users to allow them to skip upgrades, it feels like more nickel and dime tactics to me.
WnZ39p0Dgydaz1|4 years ago
vergessenmir|4 years ago
It is a shame since I rooted hard for them in the early days.
pm90|4 years ago
I remember the early days when Docker had just released, all devs were super excited but nobody had run containers “in production”. AFAIK I believe it was mesos that was used widely for orchestrating containers in production. Docker swarm/compose just took too long to get there and k8s just rapidly took over and became the standard.
imiric|4 years ago
howolduis|4 years ago
EDIT: typo
kordlessagain|4 years ago
Cthulhu_|4 years ago
Who is denying it? Who is "we"?
brennerm|4 years ago
Jleagle|4 years ago
Not heard it blamed for using up hard drives before.
raesene9|4 years ago
TBH I'm surprised that they managed to keep this going as long as they have. Giving away free compute is a tricky thing to make financially viable.
TimWolla|4 years ago
gtirloni|4 years ago
ekidd|4 years ago
For example, I maintain a Docker image that builds statically-linked Rust binaries for Linux. It includes static versions of several C dependencies. It's useful mostly because setting up cross-compilation is really tricky and the details change occasionally.
I've been keeping it up to date for many years, and it has about 750k downloads (which is pretty decent for a compile-time-only Rust image). I don't mind maintaining it as a volunteer service for people who use it. But there's a good chance that I'll simply retire it, and that any paying Docker customers will need to figure out how to cross-compile weird C libraries on their own.
I'm not complaining. Docker owes me nothing, and I can just build images for my own use.
dividedbyzero|4 years ago
If everyone and everything went paid-only, you'd see a lot less open source software get made. I may be ready to sink a bunch of time into that sorely-missing piece of software I know how to write, but I wouldn't be willing to throw a bunch of money in as well, and I'm sure lots of others would draw a line there.
Same thing with open-sourcing things created at work; it's a hard sell already, but with an ongoing financial commitment, not going to happen. So personally I'm very happy that lots companies still support this sort of thing with free services, and I really hope this kind of crypto cancer won't kill all of them eventually.
SlimyHog|4 years ago
zwass|4 years ago
Should we look into implementing our own registry with AWS ECR or similar?
captn3m0|4 years ago
>Yes! We offer unlimited storage and serving of public repositories.
[0]: https://quay.io/
mmbleh|4 years ago
Hamuko|4 years ago
nirui|4 years ago
I wish the company could eventually found a way to make more money. Kubernetes too heavy to run, while Docker Swarm is rather reasonable. I guess there is a market gap?(???)
detaro|4 years ago
mulltea|4 years ago
bdcravens|4 years ago
Hashicorp Nomad is an open-source option.
j1elo|4 years ago
I'm thinking of behavior analysis, such as the one some network firewalls do... not sure if that's even feasible at the process level, though.
nrmitchi|4 years ago
The question is whether or not it's worth the effort (for Dockerhub). If they were leading in their space, and had a successful business, then maybe, but in the current situation it would be a large investment in providing something for free.
Remember that this change only applies to the free plans, not to anyone paying.
barkingcat|4 years ago
I'd rather docker spend engineering time on improving their paid service to legitimate customers.
yabones|4 years ago
kryptn|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
damsta|4 years ago
devmor|4 years ago
palijer|4 years ago
Then the community asked for a feature, the company implemented it at a price point.