12 ms·

Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years

327 points by smalter 4y ago

bdcravens 4y ago
For the many here who have moved to an alternative (colima, Rancher, podman, etc), other than cost, is there a compelling (ie technical) advantage to these options? (on macos specifically)
- moduspol 4y ago
  Kubernetes deprecated Docker support a few years back, so there will come a day that it may not be part of Docker Desktop. Rancher Desktop supports k3s with containerd out of the box, which has no announced deprecation. It's possible they plan to add containerd support to the built-in Kubernetes management of Docker Desktop once Docker is no longer supported, but I haven't heard about it. Beyond that, I'm not aware of any technical advantages. For me Rancher Desktop essentially covers 99% of what Docker Desktop did, so just knowing that there won't be a point where it'll cost money is valuable.
  - justincormack 4y ago
    (CTO of Docker here) Kubernetes moved Docker support out of the main repo, late last year. It is still supported and works, it is just an external repo now. As well as this Docker runs on containerd (which was originally a Docker project to work more closely with the Kubernetes project, now a CNCF project), and Docker Desktop now has a beta option to run the full containerd backend, including the image store, which we may well use to provide a common image store across Kubernetes and Docker engine in future, we are still exploring the many ways in which we can continue to improve the Kubernetes on Docker Desktop.
    - moduspol 4y ago
      Makes sense. Thanks for chiming in!
v3ss0n 4y ago
Tried several gui alternative because docker desktop offer nothing and ends up enjoying lazydocker https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker
pharmakom 4y ago
I use Docker all over the place but I don’t pay Docker inc one cent.
- benatkin 4y ago
  git mv Dockerfile Containerfile git mv .dockerignore .containerignore brew install podman
makestuff 4y ago
So they waited until it was ingrained in most companies and then started charging for it? This seems like twist on the common play of subsidize with VC dollars until you have a large market share then increase the price to profitability.
- benjaminwootton 4y ago
  No, it was a change in strategy. The first attempt was to sell a crappy PaaS and container registry. The second attempt was about monetising the desktop tools, more of a Dev tools play. They have never really tried to bait and switch and monetise the Docker engine which always seemed like an open goal to me. $XX/year per engine and they would have been the next VMWare. Alas, seems like the current strategy is working well. Alongside the change in strategy, I think there has also been a change in culture. Docker 1.0 was absolutely dripping in arrogance and weren’t set up for an enterprise sale. Developer tools seems like a much more natural fit.
satvikpendem 4y ago
Who knew charging for your products and services instead of giving them away for free yields more money?
cmer 4y ago
The problem I see with their business model is that the technology has long been commoditized, and alternatives are often better. It's a pretty tough spot to be in. Anecdotally, I use Colima on my Mac, and it is better than Docker Desktop in pretty much every way I can think of. I'm sure I'm not alone. Generally, a company like Docker would sell support agreements (ie: how Red Hat does it), but selling support to developers rather than to support core infrastructure/production deployments probably wouldn't work. I hope they can figure it out and succeed.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  This issue was brought up in the initial hacker news thread, when Docker was moving towards this pricing model. Here we are, $120M ARR later. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28369570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28369570
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    Competitive Docker Desktop replacements (podman) are just starting to see adoption IMO. Let's see the number next year. Lots of companies had no other choice but to pay.
    - cabraca 4y ago
      Maybe i'm just in a bubble but none of those Docker Desktop replacements work well on a locked down corporate laptop. Sure you can get it to work somehow, manually configuring proxies, dns and stuff. Docker Desktop somehow just works. Thats why we pay for it.
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        Really? I can run containers without root on Podman, which I could never do with Docker.
      - hhh 4y ago
        Rancher Desktop works on my Macbook w/ Crowdstrike, Zscaler, Globalprotect, and I'm sure a few other things. Multipass doesn't.
FunnyLookinHat 4y ago
Our company pays for Docker Desktop licenses, but we've made every other effort to not rely on Docker directly (e.g. DockerHub) to avoid the SPF. Pull-through caches with ECR were a quick way to drastically reduce reliance further. Given the state of our internal tooling, we can conceivably move to podman or similar within the next year if the license fees become onerous, but, given the size of our org, we likely will just keep forking over license fees as it's cheaper than the salary to remove the dependency.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  I feel like it's also good to pay in order to support the company, so long as they continue to provide something of value.
  - AeroNotix 4y ago
    This is terrible financial advice.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      If paying for docker affects your bottom line, you have bigger problems. In the meantime, not paying things creates a tragedy of the commons and distorts the market (by giving an advantage to incumbents who earn money on other things).
    - pwinnski 4y ago
      It doesn't seem like financial advice, but life advice.
    - arcturus17 4y ago
      Some companies are probably not far away from technical collapse if a few of their critical open source libraries and tooling go to shit. Better cough up a little bit now than have to fork in the future and set up a whole new team to maintain that dependency - likely with much worse results than before.
caleblloyd 4y ago
The buildkit tooling such as `docker buildx bake` is great. I haven't seen this level of innovation from the other OCI builders that are aiming to replace Docker. I found the first scenario that I actually wanted to pay Docker for- a dedicated, hosted Buildx runner. Not some multi-tenant thing that reads and writes a slow cache to S3 before and after every build. A fast one, that keeps the cache hot. I'd pay 2x whatever the EC2 instance cost would be to have this managed and updated automatically.
paxys 4y ago
I remember everyone had written Docker off for dead when they announced their updated pricing plans, but they really made perfect sense, and I am happy to see the company recover. A large chunk of the tech world today relies on their products, but they were making next to nothing for it. It is definitely worth it for large companies to throw a few dollars their way considering the massive amount of value they are getting out of it. Whereas my company had no use for their earlier product offerings (private Docker Hub repos, Docker Swarm) we gladly paid money for Docker Desktop without even thinking about it.
- that_guy_iain 4y ago
  Everytime there is a price hike everyone complains that said product is dead and open source competitor will replace it. Nearly always, the people complaining aren’t thinking about starting an open source project.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  It just goes to show how what enterprise customers value and what individual developers value are two very different things.
  - brianwawok 4y ago
    Yes very much. It's a whole new world selling enterprise vs anyone else. Small business selling is much more like selling to consumers.
  - jchw 4y ago
    The problem I have with Docker is very simple; to individual users, they provide a service invaluable in a similar vein, though not of similar importance necessarily, to Wikipedia or Archive.org; Docker is literally a utility, which can enable tons of different interactions. The open source community is flooded with different ways to use Docker and take advantage of OCI images and whatnot. I just recently gave distrobox a spin, for example. I use Podman as my container engine, but the theory is the same, and most of the images are on Dockerhub. The problem here is simple; it only provides this immense value if it is effectively free without discrimination. But of course, it can't really just be free, or at least Dockerhub certainly can't be. On the other hand, it also provides immense value to enterprise and even smaller customers, too, clearly. And I don't think anybody ever strongly doubted that aspect, it just was more doubted whether you could make a business out of it. But lo and behold, Dockerhub was integrated enough into the ecosystem and without an a strong enough alternative that it didn't seem to matter. I assume Docker Desktop also factors into this somehow, but I don't know. I don't use it. Even on Windows and macOS, in the event I must use them to do dev work, I just use Podman Machine. Works well enough for me, and I don't care about a desktop UI (although apparently a couple do exist.) I am glad that at the end of the day, I haven't seen any super bad fallout from this. I'm still able to use Docker images on my NAS without paying a monthly subscription. Whatever their rate limit is, I'm not hitting it. I'm sure it's a super bad pain in the ass for certain parties though. Like I bet GitHub has a deal to keep Dockerhub unlimited in it's CI, but smaller providers that do CI like srht are probably screwed. That's a shame for the entire ecosystem.
gigatexal 4y ago
Yeah and everyone I know is moving to podman or colima
hnarn 4y ago
> 254% YoY from ~$11M ARR in late 2020 to ~$135M at the end of 2022 just by flipping Docker Hub and Docker Desktop to paid for businesses I have never met a single person who pays, or works for a company that pays, for Docker Desktop. Why would you? Paying for Docker Hub seems like something that people do because they have to short-term, but there’s no genuine selling point to it long-term and I suspect people will migrate to self hosted solutions if they have not already, so it doesn’t strike me as particularly sustainable revenue.
- deleted 4y ago
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- iancarroll 4y ago
  > Why would you? Because the license often requires it.
- VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
  Just like I don't know anybody that pays for Oracle... because I live in a bubble.
  - hnarn 4y ago
    Oracle had a 2022 yearly revenue of $42.4 billion. If Docker increased their revenue ten-fold it would still be around 40 times smaller than Oracle.
    - rat9988 4y ago
      It's still tangential to his point though.
    - bdcravens 4y ago
      Doesn't that prove the point however? If a company as large as Oracle has unseen customers, then Docker definitely does.
    - tinco 4y ago
      So you're saying they could grow to 1.2B ARR and you still wouldn't know anyone who would pay for it? I need to get in on this.
deleted 4y ago
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adriancr 4y ago
I am pretty happy they've managed to grow. I'm also pretty happy with the pro plan, it's pretty convenient to use as its default most places, free storage and transfers for images, no surprise costs. Haven't seen the appeal of docker desktop though as linux user...
mrjin 4y ago
There is a high cost of switching tech stack for companies, especially when availability of alternatives is unclear yet. So lots of companies will have no choice but pay for it. But for individuals it would be a complete different story. I've been playing with PodMan on linux in my home lab for a while now and I'm super happy with it, especially it doesn't need root in most of the cases.
- osdril 4y ago
  That's why it remained free for individuals
shaoonb 4y ago
Can't speak for anyone else, but my company is migrating away from Docker Desktop to Rancher in order to save money. We'll see how well that goes.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > Can't speak for anyone else, but my company is migrating away from Docker Desktop to Rancher in order to save money. Their Rancher Desktop offering seems to be promising: https://rancherdesktop.io/ https://rancherdesktop.io/ Much the same way how Podman Desktop seems nice: https://podman-desktop.io/ https://podman-desktop.io/ Though personally, Docker has always been a safe bet (both the desktop software, as well as the container runtime), I think I'll stick with it for a few years and let others take the early adopter risks, and use the alternatives when they've been more battle tested.
  - v3ss0n 4y ago
    Why there are needs to use docker GUIs? Docker compose and lazy docker is all I need for managing over 80 docker containers , both dev and production https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker
    - KronisLV 4y ago
      > Why there are needs to use docker GUIs? Because to some people using GUIs are more approachable and in some case objectively better (e.g. telling the state of things at a glance and efficiently using screen real estate, with graphs and whatnot), whereas the ways they're worse in might not dealbreakers (e.g. lack of automation, given that there can still be APIs or access to the underlying cluster anyways). For an example of this, see pieces of software that one can use to manage orchestrators (essentially one step further than just running individual containers, but a good example of how UIs can be useful): - Portainer: https://www.portainer.io/ https://www.portainer.io/ - Rancher: https://www.rancher.com/products/rancher https://www.rancher.com/products/rancher Some orchestrators even include dashboards on their own: - Kubernetes dashboard: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/web-ui-dashboard/ https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/... - Nomad web UI: https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/tutorials/web-ui https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/tutorials/web-ui And some of that applies to running regular containers and managing them locally: for many it can be useful to be able to just click around to discover more details about a container, as well as what's using storage and so on. Thankfully the CLIs of Docker and competing runtimes are pretty well structured as they are, but I guess it's just a different type of UX. At the end of the day, what works for you, or even what you find comfortable to use, might not be the case for someone else and vice versa. It's definitely nice to have that choice in the first place, and to know the various options out there.
drewda 4y ago
For what it's worth, I'd call this "Docker 3.0" given that the first iteration was dotCloud, their Heroku competitor — I liked using that!
moduspol 4y ago
I'll be interested to see how this turns out. This is already looking more positive for them than I expected. Rancher Desktop has been working great for me, so I'm not sure they'll be able to keep increasing their numbers with so closely comparable free competitors. I'd be curious what the breakdown is in terms of how much of their value is from Docker Desktop vs. Docker Hub vs. ancillary features.
dimitrios1 4y ago
I really enjoy using docker compose to run most of my hobby and small project websites on small cloud nodes. With the remote builder functionality, it makes CICD and deployments trivially easy for me as well.
timost 4y ago
On debian and Ubuntu there is the podman-docker [1] package which is really convenient. It allows you to use docker commands with podman as the underlying engine. [1] https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/podman-docker https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/podman-docker
maxproske 4y ago
SJ rulz!
szastamasta 4y ago
Great to hear that. While I’m not a big fan of Docker desktop I really wish they restart docker swarm and kill thad abomination named Kubernetes. Docker compose and swarm are really cool technologies - easy to start with and more than enough for small and medium companies. I really hope they would bring it back and we start seeing managed swarm from cloud providers.
- marvinblum 4y ago
  HashiCorp Nomad is a nice alternative is something you can look into if you're looking for a lightweight Kubernetes replacement. Also, it doesn't support everything Kubernetes does, it should be enough for most use cases.
  - szastamasta 4y ago
    Thanks, been thinking about it. It looks really nice, but it’s really hard to beat how easily you can go from compose in local development to swarm on prod in small team.
    - chromatin 4y ago
      OTOH, you can go from Nomad in local development to Nomad in production pretty easily, too.
    - Too 4y ago
      Running k8s locally with kind isn't that bad either. Apart from having to load rebuilt images into the cluster all the time you can for most of the part reuse the same pod-manifests as you do in cloud environment.
- jstepka 4y ago
  Docker swarm was sold off. https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/13/mirantis-acquires-docker-enterprise/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/13/mirantis-acquires-docker-e...
vcryan 4y ago
Enjoy while it lasts. People are pissed about the approach they took to gain marketshare before changing the terms. Soon enough there will be a viable free alternative.
karaterobot 4y ago
> ... capturing the credit card of the end-user developer for low-priced seats as a wedge into seat expansion in the org. What a weird and gross series of words and concepts, all strung together like that.
deleted 4y ago
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lopkeny12ko 4y ago
I'm surprised Docker Desktop drives so much revenue. As far as I know, it is a Mac and Windows-specific tool. Are FAANG and FAANG-like developers not using Linux machines locally despite deploying production software on Linux servers? Even for enterprise developers who use Mac and Windows, isn't 99% of day-to-day development on a Linux box you SSH into anyways? I've never really quite grasped the need for Docker Desktop.
- ilyt 4y ago
  There is a myth that software developers are good with computers but that's mostly not the case, hence heavy mac/windows usage, harder to break than someone with linux machine and root. Also Ubuntu kinda breaks more for normal users.
  - enumjorge 4y ago
    You're forgetting the good developers who want to minimize the time spent dealing with issues or idiosyncrasies at the OS level.
    - okanat 4y ago
      I am one of the developers who maintain our embedded Linux distro. I use WSL2 to compile it. I used Linux desktops for 15 years as my primary desktop previously and I will never go back to Linux desktop. I spend less to no time on Windows for configuring the HiDPI displays, finding hacks to make presentations and chat software work, dealing with dodgy drivers.
  - therealdrag0 4y ago
    As if we’re being protected from ourselves instead of choosing windows or Mac?
- emptysongglass 4y ago
  It's also for Linux.
uzername 4y ago
I work at a pretty large corporation that uses docker desktop. The engineering team is in the low hundreds spread across the world. We happily pay for what we use and it's all great. We don't really use many features of docker desktop though. We have our own image space (ecr) and I don't think anyone is using or relying on extensions. I'm sure some team will eventually socialize an alternative. The reason we went through with paying for docker desktop was probably the lost time and productivity of transitioning off without due diligence dedicated on getting another option to work just as well. I don't know if our org gets customized pricing, but if it's $24/mo for us, that's maybe a 1/3 of an hour of the least expensive run rate engineer we have (worldwide, again), per month. That's maybe 5 hours of run rate time per year per engineer. I can see why our org bought in at the time and continues. On a personal note, I was fine with the change, since it allowed personal use still with docker desktop. When Docker Desktop for Linux came out, I gave it a try on a clean server. Unfortunately, even on a fresh Ubuntu install with fresh hardware, the reliability of Docker Desktop for Ubuntu was awful, crashing every few days into a stalled state. I had to make a cron job to watch it and maintain it's uptime.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  Do you/your corporation use Docker Compose?
  - uzername 4y ago
    We deploy everything in kubernetes in the live environments, with databases in rds, s3 for objects, sometimes dynamo for other data types or patterns. Locally there's docker compose for the APIs (Java, python) and usually postgres. It's a good observation, interrupting that workflow would be quite a pain.
kdrag0n 4y ago
Looks like there's a lot of discussion about Docker Desktop alternatives here, so shameless plug: I've been working on a new Linux+Docker+Kubernetes solution for macOS recently! Already has quite a few improvements over existing apps including Docker Desktop, Rancher, Colima, etc: - Fast networking: 30 Gbps! vs. 150 Mbps with Docker VPNKit. Full VPN compatibility, IPv6, ping, ICMP and UDP traceroute, and half-open TCP connections. (Future work: transparent proxies) - Bidirectional filesystem sharing: fast VirtioFS to access macOS from Linux, but there's also access to the Linux filesystem from macOS. This can help with performance: for example, you could store code in Linux and edit it from macOS with VS Code (which can take the performance hit of sharing), so the container runs with native FS speed. - Not limited to Docker or Kubernetes. You can run multiple full Linux distros as system containers (like WSL) so they share resources. - Fast x86 emulation with Rosetta - Bidirectional CLI integration like WSL - Much lower background CPU usage. Only ~0.05% CPU usage and 2-5 idle wakeups per second — less than most apps, while Docker wakes up ~120 times per second. Made possible with low-level kernel optimizations. Also, no Electron! - Better solutions to other problems that can occur on macOS: clock drift is corrected monotonically, dynamic disk size, and more I'm working on now. Will look into memory usage too, although I can't guarantee a good fix for that. - No root needed Planning to release it as a paid app later this month. Not OSS, but I think the value proposition is pretty good and there will be a free trial. Not sure about pricing yet. (Let me know if you have any thoughts on this!) If anyone is interested, drop me an email (see bio) and I'll let you know when this is ready for testing, likely within a week or two at most :) Also, feel free to ask questions here or let me know if there are other warts you'd like to see fixed.
- turtleyacht 4y ago
  May I ask, what language(s)/stack is it written in? It sounds like it has a ton of great features. I guess virtualization is its own domain, much like video encoders, cryptography, and systems programming. Feels like the gateway to those is C and assembly.
  - kdrag0n 4y ago
    It's a mix of Go, Rust, Swift, and C, but I didn't write any virtualization code—it's all built around Apple's Virtualization.framework because that's the only way to use Rosetta in VMs. (The architecture bits are behind a private API in Hypervisor.framework.)
sangeeth96 4y ago
I'm skeptic how long this will last unless they bring out some cutting-edge innovations. I frankly used and loved Docker Desktop for a long time because it was the easiest way to get going and I believe even k8s is included now which is great for hobbyists and those who just want to get things done. But, I've been annoyed by the UX changes and the push to login to docker hub. While in 2023, there are most certainly great alternatives that are relatively easy to install from the terminal and get going, I guess there's not yet a definitive replacement that comes with the GUI too. Best I can think of is Podman Desktop Companion[1] but not sure how well this works. [1]: https://iongion.github.io/podman-desktop-companion/ https://iongion.github.io/podman-desktop-companion/
user3939382 4y ago
The second there's a CLI-only 100% compatible Docker Desktop replacement for macOS I'll use it. Docker Desktop on macOS is insanely slow and there's 0 reason it should be a GUI app that lives in my menubar, it's just ridiculous. So far all the alternatives are "mostly" compatible with caveats here and there.
- tpmx 4y ago
  Yeah. It also relatively often breaks and requires a purge. I need to do it approximately once per month.
- osdril 4y ago
  There's Colima[0], but in my experience it still isn't as stable as Docker Desktop. It also isn't any faster and I doubt any competing software will be, since the best way to virtualize Linux on macOS right now is to use Apple's Virtualization.framework with VirtioFS which is exactly what DD (and Colima) is doing. On a personal note, I find the menu bar icon useful to see whether the VM is running and to pause/resume it (a functionality that none of the alternatives have). [0](https://github.com/abiosoft/colima https://github.com/abiosoft/colima)
rubyist5eva 4y ago
When they started charging for Docker Desktop I immediately uninstalled it and just installed the cli-client on my mac machine, and started running Docker itself in an Ubuntu VM and set the $DOCKER_HOST on the host machine and do everything in the CLI. The only reason I use $DOCKER_HOST at all is because I'm just too lazy to have an SSH session constantly open to the vm to run docker commands, otherwise I would just install the docker snap in Ubuntu and call it a day and use it directly. My company is still small enough that we could use Docker Desktop for free, but I refuse to get sucked into such a shitty value proposition. I question your competence if you can't run docker commands in a terminal and think $5 per month for a lousy electron app that wraps the commands with some buttons is good value. The fact they they are making $135M ARR and the company is valued at over a billion dollars is absolutely insane when superior alternatives that are Free exist.
themoop 4y ago
Everyone talks about how docker desktop will be replaced as it's a commodity and I agree. However I see no one talking about the value Docker hub brings which is now bundled with all paid users. By paying we didn't have to migrate anything and are now building and pushing every commit on our app as a 800mb image (I know its a little to big...). We are storing hundreds if not thousands of images and uploading / pulling TBs. This kind of usage appears much pricier in container registry offered by cloud vendors
wanderingmind 4y ago
I'm more interested in seeing if Amazon can productize firecracker to create a substitute for docker. The security of firecracker is pretty good compared to docker and can also enable development that puts serverless architecture first
ngc248 4y ago
Happy for them, even though containers were already extant, docker were the ones who came up with the container image format and made it all easy peasy.
trallnag 4y ago
Slightly off-topic: Has anyone ever figured out how to stop Docker Desktop from symlinking the ~/.aws directory from Windows to WSL2 distributions? I'm a paying customer (through my company) and it's a pain in the ass.

327 points by smalter 4y ago

For the many here who have moved to an alternative (colima, Rancher, podman, etc), other than cost, is there a compelling (ie technical) advantage to these options? (on macos specifically)

moduspol 4y ago
Kubernetes deprecated Docker support a few years back, so there will come a day that it may not be part of Docker Desktop. Rancher Desktop supports k3s with containerd out of the box, which has no announced deprecation. It's possible they plan to add containerd support to the built-in Kubernetes management of Docker Desktop once Docker is no longer supported, but I haven't heard about it. Beyond that, I'm not aware of any technical advantages. For me Rancher Desktop essentially covers 99% of what Docker Desktop did, so just knowing that there won't be a point where it'll cost money is valuable.
- justincormack 4y ago
  (CTO of Docker here) Kubernetes moved Docker support out of the main repo, late last year. It is still supported and works, it is just an external repo now. As well as this Docker runs on containerd (which was originally a Docker project to work more closely with the Kubernetes project, now a CNCF project), and Docker Desktop now has a beta option to run the full containerd backend, including the image store, which we may well use to provide a common image store across Kubernetes and Docker engine in future, we are still exploring the many ways in which we can continue to improve the Kubernetes on Docker Desktop.
  - moduspol 4y ago
    Makes sense. Thanks for chiming in!

v3ss0n 4y ago

Tried several gui alternative because docker desktop offer nothing and ends up enjoying lazydocker https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker

pharmakom 4y ago

I use Docker all over the place but I don’t pay Docker inc one cent.

benatkin 4y ago
git mv Dockerfile Containerfile git mv .dockerignore .containerignore brew install podman

makestuff 4y ago

So they waited until it was ingrained in most companies and then started charging for it? This seems like twist on the common play of subsidize with VC dollars until you have a large market share then increase the price to profitability.

benjaminwootton 4y ago
No, it was a change in strategy. The first attempt was to sell a crappy PaaS and container registry. The second attempt was about monetising the desktop tools, more of a Dev tools play. They have never really tried to bait and switch and monetise the Docker engine which always seemed like an open goal to me. $XX/year per engine and they would have been the next VMWare. Alas, seems like the current strategy is working well. Alongside the change in strategy, I think there has also been a change in culture. Docker 1.0 was absolutely dripping in arrogance and weren’t set up for an enterprise sale. Developer tools seems like a much more natural fit.

satvikpendem 4y ago

Who knew charging for your products and services instead of giving them away for free yields more money?

cmer 4y ago

The problem I see with their business model is that the technology has long been commoditized, and alternatives are often better. It's a pretty tough spot to be in. Anecdotally, I use Colima on my Mac, and it is better than Docker Desktop in pretty much every way I can think of. I'm sure I'm not alone. Generally, a company like Docker would sell support agreements (ie: how Red Hat does it), but selling support to developers rather than to support core infrastructure/production deployments probably wouldn't work. I hope they can figure it out and succeed.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
This issue was brought up in the initial hacker news thread, when Docker was moving towards this pricing model. Here we are, $120M ARR later. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28369570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28369570
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  Competitive Docker Desktop replacements (podman) are just starting to see adoption IMO. Let's see the number next year. Lots of companies had no other choice but to pay.
  - cabraca 4y ago
    Maybe i'm just in a bubble but none of those Docker Desktop replacements work well on a locked down corporate laptop. Sure you can get it to work somehow, manually configuring proxies, dns and stuff. Docker Desktop somehow just works. Thats why we pay for it.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      Really? I can run containers without root on Podman, which I could never do with Docker.
    - hhh 4y ago
      Rancher Desktop works on my Macbook w/ Crowdstrike, Zscaler, Globalprotect, and I'm sure a few other things. Multipass doesn't.

FunnyLookinHat 4y ago

Our company pays for Docker Desktop licenses, but we've made every other effort to not rely on Docker directly (e.g. DockerHub) to avoid the SPF. Pull-through caches with ECR were a quick way to drastically reduce reliance further. Given the state of our internal tooling, we can conceivably move to podman or similar within the next year if the license fees become onerous, but, given the size of our org, we likely will just keep forking over license fees as it's cheaper than the salary to remove the dependency.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
I feel like it's also good to pay in order to support the company, so long as they continue to provide something of value.
- AeroNotix 4y ago
  This is terrible financial advice.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    If paying for docker affects your bottom line, you have bigger problems. In the meantime, not paying things creates a tragedy of the commons and distorts the market (by giving an advantage to incumbents who earn money on other things).
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    It doesn't seem like financial advice, but life advice.
  - arcturus17 4y ago
    Some companies are probably not far away from technical collapse if a few of their critical open source libraries and tooling go to shit. Better cough up a little bit now than have to fork in the future and set up a whole new team to maintain that dependency - likely with much worse results than before.

caleblloyd 4y ago

The buildkit tooling such as `docker buildx bake` is great. I haven't seen this level of innovation from the other OCI builders that are aiming to replace Docker. I found the first scenario that I actually wanted to pay Docker for- a dedicated, hosted Buildx runner. Not some multi-tenant thing that reads and writes a slow cache to S3 before and after every build. A fast one, that keeps the cache hot. I'd pay 2x whatever the EC2 instance cost would be to have this managed and updated automatically.

paxys 4y ago

I remember everyone had written Docker off for dead when they announced their updated pricing plans, but they really made perfect sense, and I am happy to see the company recover. A large chunk of the tech world today relies on their products, but they were making next to nothing for it. It is definitely worth it for large companies to throw a few dollars their way considering the massive amount of value they are getting out of it. Whereas my company had no use for their earlier product offerings (private Docker Hub repos, Docker Swarm) we gladly paid money for Docker Desktop without even thinking about it.

that_guy_iain 4y ago
Everytime there is a price hike everyone complains that said product is dead and open source competitor will replace it. Nearly always, the people complaining aren’t thinking about starting an open source project.
satvikpendem 4y ago
It just goes to show how what enterprise customers value and what individual developers value are two very different things.
- brianwawok 4y ago
  Yes very much. It's a whole new world selling enterprise vs anyone else. Small business selling is much more like selling to consumers.
- jchw 4y ago
  The problem I have with Docker is very simple; to individual users, they provide a service invaluable in a similar vein, though not of similar importance necessarily, to Wikipedia or Archive.org; Docker is literally a utility, which can enable tons of different interactions. The open source community is flooded with different ways to use Docker and take advantage of OCI images and whatnot. I just recently gave distrobox a spin, for example. I use Podman as my container engine, but the theory is the same, and most of the images are on Dockerhub. The problem here is simple; it only provides this immense value if it is effectively free without discrimination. But of course, it can't really just be free, or at least Dockerhub certainly can't be. On the other hand, it also provides immense value to enterprise and even smaller customers, too, clearly. And I don't think anybody ever strongly doubted that aspect, it just was more doubted whether you could make a business out of it. But lo and behold, Dockerhub was integrated enough into the ecosystem and without an a strong enough alternative that it didn't seem to matter. I assume Docker Desktop also factors into this somehow, but I don't know. I don't use it. Even on Windows and macOS, in the event I must use them to do dev work, I just use Podman Machine. Works well enough for me, and I don't care about a desktop UI (although apparently a couple do exist.) I am glad that at the end of the day, I haven't seen any super bad fallout from this. I'm still able to use Docker images on my NAS without paying a monthly subscription. Whatever their rate limit is, I'm not hitting it. I'm sure it's a super bad pain in the ass for certain parties though. Like I bet GitHub has a deal to keep Dockerhub unlimited in it's CI, but smaller providers that do CI like srht are probably screwed. That's a shame for the entire ecosystem.

gigatexal 4y ago

Yeah and everyone I know is moving to podman or colima

hnarn 4y ago

> 254% YoY from ~$11M ARR in late 2020 to ~$135M at the end of 2022 just by flipping Docker Hub and Docker Desktop to paid for businesses I have never met a single person who pays, or works for a company that pays, for Docker Desktop. Why would you? Paying for Docker Hub seems like something that people do because they have to short-term, but there’s no genuine selling point to it long-term and I suspect people will migrate to self hosted solutions if they have not already, so it doesn’t strike me as particularly sustainable revenue.

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iancarroll 4y ago
> Why would you? Because the license often requires it.
VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
Just like I don't know anybody that pays for Oracle... because I live in a bubble.
- hnarn 4y ago
  Oracle had a 2022 yearly revenue of $42.4 billion. If Docker increased their revenue ten-fold it would still be around 40 times smaller than Oracle.
  - rat9988 4y ago
    It's still tangential to his point though.
  - bdcravens 4y ago
    Doesn't that prove the point however? If a company as large as Oracle has unseen customers, then Docker definitely does.
  - tinco 4y ago
    So you're saying they could grow to 1.2B ARR and you still wouldn't know anyone who would pay for it? I need to get in on this.

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adriancr 4y ago

I am pretty happy they've managed to grow. I'm also pretty happy with the pro plan, it's pretty convenient to use as its default most places, free storage and transfers for images, no surprise costs. Haven't seen the appeal of docker desktop though as linux user...

mrjin 4y ago

There is a high cost of switching tech stack for companies, especially when availability of alternatives is unclear yet. So lots of companies will have no choice but pay for it. But for individuals it would be a complete different story. I've been playing with PodMan on linux in my home lab for a while now and I'm super happy with it, especially it doesn't need root in most of the cases.

osdril 4y ago
That's why it remained free for individuals

shaoonb 4y ago

Can't speak for anyone else, but my company is migrating away from Docker Desktop to Rancher in order to save money. We'll see how well that goes.

KronisLV 4y ago
> Can't speak for anyone else, but my company is migrating away from Docker Desktop to Rancher in order to save money. Their Rancher Desktop offering seems to be promising: https://rancherdesktop.io/ https://rancherdesktop.io/ Much the same way how Podman Desktop seems nice: https://podman-desktop.io/ https://podman-desktop.io/ Though personally, Docker has always been a safe bet (both the desktop software, as well as the container runtime), I think I'll stick with it for a few years and let others take the early adopter risks, and use the alternatives when they've been more battle tested.
- v3ss0n 4y ago
  Why there are needs to use docker GUIs? Docker compose and lazy docker is all I need for managing over 80 docker containers , both dev and production https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    > Why there are needs to use docker GUIs? Because to some people using GUIs are more approachable and in some case objectively better (e.g. telling the state of things at a glance and efficiently using screen real estate, with graphs and whatnot), whereas the ways they're worse in might not dealbreakers (e.g. lack of automation, given that there can still be APIs or access to the underlying cluster anyways). For an example of this, see pieces of software that one can use to manage orchestrators (essentially one step further than just running individual containers, but a good example of how UIs can be useful): - Portainer: https://www.portainer.io/ https://www.portainer.io/ - Rancher: https://www.rancher.com/products/rancher https://www.rancher.com/products/rancher Some orchestrators even include dashboards on their own: - Kubernetes dashboard: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/web-ui-dashboard/ https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/... - Nomad web UI: https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/tutorials/web-ui https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/tutorials/web-ui And some of that applies to running regular containers and managing them locally: for many it can be useful to be able to just click around to discover more details about a container, as well as what's using storage and so on. Thankfully the CLIs of Docker and competing runtimes are pretty well structured as they are, but I guess it's just a different type of UX. At the end of the day, what works for you, or even what you find comfortable to use, might not be the case for someone else and vice versa. It's definitely nice to have that choice in the first place, and to know the various options out there.

drewda 4y ago

For what it's worth, I'd call this "Docker 3.0" given that the first iteration was dotCloud, their Heroku competitor — I liked using that!

moduspol 4y ago

I'll be interested to see how this turns out. This is already looking more positive for them than I expected. Rancher Desktop has been working great for me, so I'm not sure they'll be able to keep increasing their numbers with so closely comparable free competitors. I'd be curious what the breakdown is in terms of how much of their value is from Docker Desktop vs. Docker Hub vs. ancillary features.

dimitrios1 4y ago

I really enjoy using docker compose to run most of my hobby and small project websites on small cloud nodes. With the remote builder functionality, it makes CICD and deployments trivially easy for me as well.

timost 4y ago

On debian and Ubuntu there is the podman-docker [1] package which is really convenient. It allows you to use docker commands with podman as the underlying engine. [1] https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/podman-docker https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/podman-docker

maxproske 4y ago

SJ rulz!

szastamasta 4y ago

Great to hear that. While I’m not a big fan of Docker desktop I really wish they restart docker swarm and kill thad abomination named Kubernetes. Docker compose and swarm are really cool technologies - easy to start with and more than enough for small and medium companies. I really hope they would bring it back and we start seeing managed swarm from cloud providers.

marvinblum 4y ago
HashiCorp Nomad is a nice alternative is something you can look into if you're looking for a lightweight Kubernetes replacement. Also, it doesn't support everything Kubernetes does, it should be enough for most use cases.
- szastamasta 4y ago
  Thanks, been thinking about it. It looks really nice, but it’s really hard to beat how easily you can go from compose in local development to swarm on prod in small team.
  - chromatin 4y ago
    OTOH, you can go from Nomad in local development to Nomad in production pretty easily, too.
  - Too 4y ago
    Running k8s locally with kind isn't that bad either. Apart from having to load rebuilt images into the cluster all the time you can for most of the part reuse the same pod-manifests as you do in cloud environment.
jstepka 4y ago
Docker swarm was sold off. https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/13/mirantis-acquires-docker-enterprise/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/13/mirantis-acquires-docker-e...

vcryan 4y ago

Enjoy while it lasts. People are pissed about the approach they took to gain marketshare before changing the terms. Soon enough there will be a viable free alternative.

karaterobot 4y ago

> ... capturing the credit card of the end-user developer for low-priced seats as a wedge into seat expansion in the org. What a weird and gross series of words and concepts, all strung together like that.

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lopkeny12ko 4y ago

I'm surprised Docker Desktop drives so much revenue. As far as I know, it is a Mac and Windows-specific tool. Are FAANG and FAANG-like developers not using Linux machines locally despite deploying production software on Linux servers? Even for enterprise developers who use Mac and Windows, isn't 99% of day-to-day development on a Linux box you SSH into anyways? I've never really quite grasped the need for Docker Desktop.

ilyt 4y ago
There is a myth that software developers are good with computers but that's mostly not the case, hence heavy mac/windows usage, harder to break than someone with linux machine and root. Also Ubuntu kinda breaks more for normal users.
- enumjorge 4y ago
  You're forgetting the good developers who want to minimize the time spent dealing with issues or idiosyncrasies at the OS level.
  - okanat 4y ago
    I am one of the developers who maintain our embedded Linux distro. I use WSL2 to compile it. I used Linux desktops for 15 years as my primary desktop previously and I will never go back to Linux desktop. I spend less to no time on Windows for configuring the HiDPI displays, finding hacks to make presentations and chat software work, dealing with dodgy drivers.
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  As if we’re being protected from ourselves instead of choosing windows or Mac?
emptysongglass 4y ago
It's also for Linux.

uzername 4y ago

I work at a pretty large corporation that uses docker desktop. The engineering team is in the low hundreds spread across the world. We happily pay for what we use and it's all great. We don't really use many features of docker desktop though. We have our own image space (ecr) and I don't think anyone is using or relying on extensions. I'm sure some team will eventually socialize an alternative. The reason we went through with paying for docker desktop was probably the lost time and productivity of transitioning off without due diligence dedicated on getting another option to work just as well. I don't know if our org gets customized pricing, but if it's $24/mo for us, that's maybe a 1/3 of an hour of the least expensive run rate engineer we have (worldwide, again), per month. That's maybe 5 hours of run rate time per year per engineer. I can see why our org bought in at the time and continues. On a personal note, I was fine with the change, since it allowed personal use still with docker desktop. When Docker Desktop for Linux came out, I gave it a try on a clean server. Unfortunately, even on a fresh Ubuntu install with fresh hardware, the reliability of Docker Desktop for Ubuntu was awful, crashing every few days into a stalled state. I had to make a cron job to watch it and maintain it's uptime.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
Do you/your corporation use Docker Compose?
- uzername 4y ago
  We deploy everything in kubernetes in the live environments, with databases in rds, s3 for objects, sometimes dynamo for other data types or patterns. Locally there's docker compose for the APIs (Java, python) and usually postgres. It's a good observation, interrupting that workflow would be quite a pain.

kdrag0n 4y ago

Looks like there's a lot of discussion about Docker Desktop alternatives here, so shameless plug: I've been working on a new Linux+Docker+Kubernetes solution for macOS recently! Already has quite a few improvements over existing apps including Docker Desktop, Rancher, Colima, etc: - Fast networking: 30 Gbps! vs. 150 Mbps with Docker VPNKit. Full VPN compatibility, IPv6, ping, ICMP and UDP traceroute, and half-open TCP connections. (Future work: transparent proxies) - Bidirectional filesystem sharing: fast VirtioFS to access macOS from Linux, but there's also access to the Linux filesystem from macOS. This can help with performance: for example, you could store code in Linux and edit it from macOS with VS Code (which can take the performance hit of sharing), so the container runs with native FS speed. - Not limited to Docker or Kubernetes. You can run multiple full Linux distros as system containers (like WSL) so they share resources. - Fast x86 emulation with Rosetta - Bidirectional CLI integration like WSL - Much lower background CPU usage. Only ~0.05% CPU usage and 2-5 idle wakeups per second — less than most apps, while Docker wakes up ~120 times per second. Made possible with low-level kernel optimizations. Also, no Electron! - Better solutions to other problems that can occur on macOS: clock drift is corrected monotonically, dynamic disk size, and more I'm working on now. Will look into memory usage too, although I can't guarantee a good fix for that. - No root needed Planning to release it as a paid app later this month. Not OSS, but I think the value proposition is pretty good and there will be a free trial. Not sure about pricing yet. (Let me know if you have any thoughts on this!) If anyone is interested, drop me an email (see bio) and I'll let you know when this is ready for testing, likely within a week or two at most :) Also, feel free to ask questions here or let me know if there are other warts you'd like to see fixed.

turtleyacht 4y ago
May I ask, what language(s)/stack is it written in? It sounds like it has a ton of great features. I guess virtualization is its own domain, much like video encoders, cryptography, and systems programming. Feels like the gateway to those is C and assembly.
- kdrag0n 4y ago
  It's a mix of Go, Rust, Swift, and C, but I didn't write any virtualization code—it's all built around Apple's Virtualization.framework because that's the only way to use Rosetta in VMs. (The architecture bits are behind a private API in Hypervisor.framework.)

sangeeth96 4y ago

I'm skeptic how long this will last unless they bring out some cutting-edge innovations. I frankly used and loved Docker Desktop for a long time because it was the easiest way to get going and I believe even k8s is included now which is great for hobbyists and those who just want to get things done. But, I've been annoyed by the UX changes and the push to login to docker hub. While in 2023, there are most certainly great alternatives that are relatively easy to install from the terminal and get going, I guess there's not yet a definitive replacement that comes with the GUI too. Best I can think of is Podman Desktop Companion[1] but not sure how well this works. [1]: https://iongion.github.io/podman-desktop-companion/ https://iongion.github.io/podman-desktop-companion/

user3939382 4y ago

The second there's a CLI-only 100% compatible Docker Desktop replacement for macOS I'll use it. Docker Desktop on macOS is insanely slow and there's 0 reason it should be a GUI app that lives in my menubar, it's just ridiculous. So far all the alternatives are "mostly" compatible with caveats here and there.

tpmx 4y ago
Yeah. It also relatively often breaks and requires a purge. I need to do it approximately once per month.
osdril 4y ago
There's Colima[0], but in my experience it still isn't as stable as Docker Desktop. It also isn't any faster and I doubt any competing software will be, since the best way to virtualize Linux on macOS right now is to use Apple's Virtualization.framework with VirtioFS which is exactly what DD (and Colima) is doing. On a personal note, I find the menu bar icon useful to see whether the VM is running and to pause/resume it (a functionality that none of the alternatives have). [0](https://github.com/abiosoft/colima https://github.com/abiosoft/colima)

rubyist5eva 4y ago

When they started charging for Docker Desktop I immediately uninstalled it and just installed the cli-client on my mac machine, and started running Docker itself in an Ubuntu VM and set the $DOCKER_HOST on the host machine and do everything in the CLI. The only reason I use $DOCKER_HOST at all is because I'm just too lazy to have an SSH session constantly open to the vm to run docker commands, otherwise I would just install the docker snap in Ubuntu and call it a day and use it directly. My company is still small enough that we could use Docker Desktop for free, but I refuse to get sucked into such a shitty value proposition. I question your competence if you can't run docker commands in a terminal and think $5 per month for a lousy electron app that wraps the commands with some buttons is good value. The fact they they are making $135M ARR and the company is valued at over a billion dollars is absolutely insane when superior alternatives that are Free exist.

themoop 4y ago

Everyone talks about how docker desktop will be replaced as it's a commodity and I agree. However I see no one talking about the value Docker hub brings which is now bundled with all paid users. By paying we didn't have to migrate anything and are now building and pushing every commit on our app as a 800mb image (I know its a little to big...). We are storing hundreds if not thousands of images and uploading / pulling TBs. This kind of usage appears much pricier in container registry offered by cloud vendors

wanderingmind 4y ago

I'm more interested in seeing if Amazon can productize firecracker to create a substitute for docker. The security of firecracker is pretty good compared to docker and can also enable development that puts serverless architecture first

ngc248 4y ago

Happy for them, even though containers were already extant, docker were the ones who came up with the container image format and made it all easy peasy.

trallnag 4y ago

Slightly off-topic: Has anyone ever figured out how to stop Docker Desktop from symlinking the ~/.aws directory from Windows to WSL2 distributions? I'm a paying customer (through my company) and it's a pain in the ass.