> 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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same here. The rug pull was not received well by our teams. The messaging was terrible. Some still joke it was a like a stick up. "Pulling a docker" has now become internal slang for firms that let you use/build for years and then ransom you later. We pivoted just after too. They also tagged my personal accounts which had nothing to do with my day job.
> 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.
"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.
>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.
They made a unique contribution which was significant in its own way. It doesn't matter in the end that others tried to do related things before and failed to get traction. They could have made Docker more restrictive to make money, and they didn't. Open source is hard to actually make money with, unfortunately for those of us who enjoy it.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
47 comments
[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 63.1 ms ] threadOpen 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.
- take advantage of the current agentic wave and announce a Docker Sandbox runner product that lets you run agents inside cloud sandboxes
But the actual experience with developing on VSCode with Dev Containers is not great. It's laggy and slow.
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.
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.
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.
Nah, the core Docker technology was an utter shitshow programmed by people without the relevant experience.
The Go IRC channel fielded repeated questions from Docker developers on how to unpack a compressed tarball from a streaming source.
At one point, Docker computed a hash of the files it downloaded, but never compared the hash to anything.
Docker was always below par for the space it wanted to be in. They had good marketing. The story has many commonalities with MongoDB.
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.
They made a unique contribution which was significant in its own way. It doesn't matter in the end that others tried to do related things before and failed to get traction. They could have made Docker more restrictive to make money, and they didn't. Open source is hard to actually make money with, unfortunately for those of us who enjoy it.
Gordon is the character from Half Life.
Docker a piece of software. Don't anthropomorphize it.
https://github.com/apple/container
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
AMA.