Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/31/docker_desktop_no_longer_free/

by alanwreath • 5 years ago

725 570 5 years ago

BCM43• 5 years ago

Since they've buried it a little:

"Specifically, small businesses (fewer than 250 employees AND less than $10 million in revenue) may continue to use Docker Desktop with Docker Personal for free. The use of Docker Desktop in large businesses, however, requires a Pro, Team, or Business paid subscription, starting at $5 per user per month."

dang4• 5 years ago

This comment was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28368997, so it's quoting the corporate press release, not the current article. We've since merged the threads.

judge20204• 5 years ago

Anyone know how they plan to enforce this? Audits into the IP space connecting to hub.docker.com? Maybe arbitrary device OS detection a la

  (nmap -O $local_subnet | grep -ci 'Macbook') > 250

qeternity10• 5 years ago

They won’t need to. The number of 250+ engineer businesses that would risk running unlicensed software is small.

physicsguy3• 5 years ago

so, when's everyone switching over to Podman?

toomuchtodo5• 5 years ago

If you're doing $10M in ARR, how much engineering time are you going to spend to switch compared to paying Docker a few thousand dollars a month? Your spend on cloud and Slack (or other comms) is likely far higher. You're probably spending more on mobile/cell business service.

"Docker attempting to monetize users of its product who can easily afford the cost." I mean, the terms seems reasonable, and wouldn't you rather support Docker vs IBM (Redhat->Podman)?

Nothing changes for users who aren't making money using Docker, but I suppose you could still spend your time switching to podman on principal.

jhawk28• 5 years ago

I'm part of a large company and I have no influence over what most other people do. My projects within the company are small so whenever these sorts of things happen, it rarely translates into the company spending a bunch of money to provide the product across the company. At best, I may be able to convince a manager to buy it for 2-10 people on my team.

stuff4ben3• 5 years ago

I'll preface this by saying I'm an IBM employee. That being said your comment rubbed me the wrong way...

wouldn't you rather support Docker vs IBM (Redhat->Podman)?

Podman is an open source product and Docker is not. I'd much rather support an open source project. And what's wrong with "supporting" IBM anyways? Did they hurt you in some way???

physicsguy3• 5 years ago

My tiny part of a division of my last company made $40 million USD per year in revenue. We had ~40 employees. Getting the funding for using something like this came from a few levels up and would be in no way guaranteed.

n42• 5 years ago

as soon as a viable alternative to Docker Desktop for Mac exists I am done with this company forever (and they seem to be anticipating that)

mdaniel• 5 years ago

Honest question: what features of DfM are you using and what alternatives have you tried that don't work for you?

justinholmes• 5 years ago

Just use multipass https://multipass.run and folder mount.

stuff4ben3• 5 years ago

why do you need the Docker Desktop? Can't you just use the command line? I mostly use Docker on Linux and even then I've almost switched everything over to Podman.

handrous3• 5 years ago

I've used Docker for years and never touched Desktop. What's indispensable about it?

raesene95• 5 years ago

If you want an open source alternative, just use Docker Engine, it's still open source.

You can install the docker client inside WSL/OSX and connect over SSH to a docker CE instance.

bionade24• 5 years ago

When it's actually 100%ly compliant in it's APIs, especially regarding podman-compose and the socket API.

cpuguy834• 5 years ago

Podman doesn't do what docker desktop does. They are not the same thing at all.

jbverschoor2• 5 years ago

What a strange sentence.. As if "Docker" is some third party. They're referring to themselves in the 3rd person.

Be warned

hbn3• 5 years ago

Meh, it's just for the headline. If someone shared the article and the title is scraped, "we're" isn't as self-explanatory and required you to look at the URL for context.

The article itself uses "we"

sekathlon• 5 years ago

they just have to delete the word "our" in the headline and all would be fine. this is just weird.

jbverschoor2• 5 years ago

"Docker is Updating and Extending Our Product Subscriptions"

It's plain wrong. You can't refer to yourself as Docker AND as "we"

dharmab3• 5 years ago

Note that Docker Desktop and Docker Engine are separate products. Docker Desktop is the desktop application package that makes Docker user-friendly on macOS and Windows. Docker Engine, the container runtime itself, remains free:

No changes to Docker Engine or any upstream open source Docker or Moby project.

If you develop on Linux, no changes are needed.

arsfeld• 5 years ago

How would that work if you're using WSL? Docker for Desktop uses WSL but creates it's own separate VM (if you can call it a VM).

Would I be able to install and run Docker inside Ubuntu's WSL distro to avoid paying for Docker for Desktop?

mishafb• 5 years ago

You probably can, there's nothing about containers that shouldn't work on WSL2

easton• 5 years ago

Yes, but you'd have to connect the Docker CLI running in Windows to the engine inside Ubuntu (not hard), and then you wouldn't be able to mount stuff in Windows into Docker containers via relative paths (you'd have to start them with /mnt/c/...). If neither of those things matter for you (like if all of your project code is inside your WSL VM), then it's totally fine.

dharmab3• 5 years ago

You could configure Docker Engine in Ubuntu to expose a network socket, and configure Docker CLI in Windows WSL to use that network socket: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Docker#Daemon_socket

raesene95• 5 years ago

You can connect to a remote Docker engine instance over SSH, which is easier to setup than exposing the Docker socket over a TCP port.

So install the client inside WSL and the engine on a Linux VM.

EDIT: https://raesene.github.io/blog/2018/11/11/Docker-18-09-SSH/ was a blog I wrote when that feature landed, AFAIK it works the same way now :)

JoyrexJ9• 5 years ago

I do all my work under WSL, and run Docker engine in WSL and it works perfectly. 100% headless.

I may have had to expose the Docker socket for VS Code containers support to work, but that wasn't any pain, and secured with TLS.

Never needed Docker Desktop, which seemed like a bloated mess.

maple3142• 5 years ago

Enable WSL2, then you can just install the docker provided by your distro package manager. For example, I am using docker packaed by Arch Linux, and it works as expected.

If you need to use `docker` command under Powershell, maybe exposing docker socket to Windows host would probably work. I didn't try it as I don't need it.

alanwreath4• 5 years ago

Not a trivial thing to run Docker natively inside of a WSL2 environment - at least my attempts to install straight docker strictly inside Ubuntu running in WSL2 always resulted in Ubuntu’s attempts to reach some .exe with regard to Docker. I did learn some fun facts WRT Linux in WSL2 - it doesn’t have systemd installed by default.

spooneybarger• 5 years ago

I've never had a problem with it. I've been using docker engine in WSL2 for a couple years.

I install `docker.io` via apt and its good to go except that package has on some ubuntu versions been missing the /etc/init.d/ startup script.

I build my WSL2 environments via Dockerfile. You can see everything here:

https://github.com/SeanTAllen/wsl-environments/tree/main/ubu...

Using that dockerfile I can then export the file system as a tar (https://wiki.seantallen.com/notes/docker-export-filesystem/) and import into wsl using the wsl import command.

ldavison• 5 years ago

I was able to get podman setup in WSL2 pretty easily following this:

https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-windows-wsl2

0xdeadbeefbabe• 5 years ago

Linux containers ought to update and extend their product subscriptions too.

rkachowski• 5 years ago

Additionally this change is effective starting August 31st 2021 - i.e. now.

justincormack5• 5 years ago

(CTO of Docker here) there is a grace period until 31 January next year, we understand that this is a change and people need time to sort out payment.

jen202• 5 years ago

… isn’t it effective January 31st then?

reustle• 5 years ago

and people need time to sort out payment

Or their removal of Docker

BitterAmethyst• 5 years ago

Curious how bound I'd be to these terms if I just don't upgrade Docker Desktop. I'm not even signed in to dockerhub and most of our containers are on an Azure private registry.

raesene95• 5 years ago

It'll be interesting to see how well this works out for Docker, I have a feeling they'll lose quite a bit of custom but convert some to this model.

I'd guess a lot of people will just use Docker engine on a Linux VM with the CLI on Windows/Mac as that'll work just fine and is open source.

This was kind of inevitable though, ultimately Docker had to find a revenue stream somewhere. Docker Hub must be massively expensive to run and developing docker's product isn't free either...

syshum3• 5 years ago

There has been a huge push in the community to switch away from docker anyway. The warning signs from the company have been there for awhile and there are several container engine's, systems, UI's and other management tools not built on docker.

This will accelerate those programs

awestroke• 5 years ago

Can you link me to a single of those alternatives? It must be equally easy to use

alanwreath4• 5 years ago

Companies with more than 250 employees or $10 million USD in annual revenue must pay a monthly subscription to adhere to the new terms of service.

kcb3• 5 years ago

Overall if they want to charge for their product that's fine. I just hate the model of release free or really permissible application, wait for widespread adoption, then tighten clamp. For what it's worth they've lost my business there.

codyogden• 5 years ago

I want to coin it as “embrace, extend, extort.”

cyral• 5 years ago

Very accurate for a lot of companies like this lately. Consider it coined.

benbristow2• 5 years ago

Same with Telerik Fiddler recently. Good piece of software for debugging network requests on Windows.

Was free for as long as I've known it existed. Telerik recently bought by 'Progress' (ironic), software re-written in Electron and now charges a subscription to use it.

Glad HTTP Toolkit is now available free for 'hobbyist' tasks - https://httptoolkit.tech/

eikenberry2• 5 years ago

Docker desktop was never really free, as in free software, was it? If so, then it was always a proprietary app and they were always in control. IE. the clamp was always tight.

chrisseaton2• 5 years ago

It was free of charge.

pjmlp3• 5 years ago

It used to be called shareware.

TeeMassive2• 5 years ago

I often get laughed at when I say we should backup every tools/repositories/packages through a proxy and use only that in our internal processes. I also get scolded at making use our Dockerfiles only calls scripts a developer can use on his own machine or any other container manager once the "too good to be free" tech of the decade goes full Oracle on us.

Then everyone panics when a critical build stops working because some apt repository of some decades old distros is unplugged or some shell script piped directly to bash goes dark (or someone with a bit of security common sense rightfully has a panic attack) and we have to salvage it using some ex-employees backup images.

This is also why I just don't say I do devops because it just gets to a point where the "devops guys" are just the people you give the dirty jobs nobody wanna do.

rad_gruchalski2• 5 years ago

So is Docker going to now maintain all the base images themselves or do they rely on the community to provide those for free?

Also, announced on 31.08, effective 31.08 (albeit grace period…)

ibly312• 5 years ago

I think you wrote the announced and effective dates twice. Effective date being 31 of January as far as I can tell. The whole point of Docker monetizing Docker Desktop is so that they can continue to be funded to maintain the base images themselves. That's the primary sell point of DockerHub.

rad_gruchalski2• 5 years ago

No, the original link was: https://www.docker.com/blog/updating-product-subscriptions/.

The page reads as follows:

These new terms take effect August 31, 2021, and there is a grace period until January 31, 2022 for those who require a paid subscription…

So: announced 31.08, effective 31.08 (albeit grace period).

To add to this, I have received their email with this announcement after after 2pm CEST on 31.08. This must have been an unplanned decision.

alanwreath4• 5 years ago

“ the Docker Desktop updated terms only apply to Mac and Windows “

dpratt• 5 years ago

This appears to be cutting of their nose to spite their face. We have a team of 50+ engineers that all use Docker for Mac for daily development tasks, but I suspect that will no longer be true in a rather short amount of time. Frankly, I don’t really know if anybody actually uses the UI components for it outside of starting and stopping the engine and for basic configuration of the VM. Everything else that comes with it is just useless cruft for our use cases.

As soon as there is a viable alternative (and I’d be happy to contribute to the effort), I’ll be moving away from Docker for Mac.

gigatexal• 5 years ago

I tried getting podman working pointing at a Linux server and ram into issues as an alternative to Docker. I’m hoping the kinks get worked out and I can move over.

SilverRed2• 5 years ago

We have been using podman here for all of our developers and have yet to find anything different to docker. Perhaps you are using a more obscure feature.

rcarmo6• 5 years ago

For the Mac, just get Canonical’s Multipass (http://multipass.run) and do an apt-get to install Docker into a VM and use VS Code to “remote” to it. It will automatically install the Docker extension inside the Linux VM and you’re set.

For Windows, use WSL2 and do the same.

Both can mount “local” folders, although the setup is obviously different.

You now have a better way to manage containers than ever before.

alanwreath4• 5 years ago

Can’t say that limiting developers to VSCode is necessarily a step forward.

nklmilojevic• 5 years ago

Doesn't work on M1 chips yet.

judge20204• 5 years ago

Do you mean APT via https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/, correct?

SkyMarshal2• 5 years ago

Why run Docker inside a VM on a Mac, when you can just run the Linux dev environment directly inside the VM? That's just starting to sound like Docker for the sake of Docker.

Multipass, Qemu, and Parallels can all provide a solid VM on Mac host. All you need after that is your dev environment VM guest image to deploy to the team.

https://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/Mac

https://www.parallels.com/

secondcoming• 5 years ago

Why don't you just use the VM directly?

hda11110• 5 years ago

This is the best solution. Multipass is also great software.

solarkraft2• 5 years ago

As soon as there is a viable alternative (and I’d be happy to contribute to the effort), I’ll be moving away from Docker for Mac.

I just SSH into my server. The biggest pain about macOS is that it can't easily mount SFTP.

smoldesu2• 5 years ago

Ouch, really? Cyberduck was always one of my first installs simply due to how much I spited Finder, but I didn't know things were... that bad.

mockingbirdy• 5 years ago

You can mount SFTP with Mountain Duck [1], from the creators of Cyberduck. Costs around $40.

[1] https://mountainduck.io

vhodges• 5 years ago

Fuse/sshfs exists for OSX. Seems to work okay the little I played with it.

wiredfool• 5 years ago

I've been doing development in docker, but unrelated to that I did an upgrade to big sur and borked the machine for a few days.

Pulling the same projects to my (admittedly quite fast) linux box in the cloud is night and day for speed in docker with volume mounts. Browserfy runs 5x faster, at least. Yarn install is 10x faster.

And it's reliable. Docker's filesharing on the mac has about a 25% failure rate that any given save will be properly picked up by watch, with a complete, uncorrupted, updated file.

boublepop• 5 years ago

Personally I think just running portainer as a container is a viable alternative to docket desktop. But I never really used the UI much, so perhaps there are features I don’t know of.

judge20204• 5 years ago

Unless there's podman or similar for local dev, you'd still need Docker Desktop to use it on Windows/MacOS.

zapita2• 5 years ago

You’re going to spend scarce engineering resources reimplementing a Docker for Mac alternative, then roll out your immature alternative to 50+ engineers, instead of paying a few hundred dollars a month for a good product and moving on?

It seems to me you would be the one cutting off your nose to spite your face in this scenario.

coding1233• 5 years ago

The reason this move isn't popular is because it seemed like local docker development (for any size corporation) was always going to be free. If I personally had known this was in the cards I would have invested (time, money and effort) into alternatives earlier on. Instead they killed all the competition and are now demanding money. So yeah, this is the first move by Docker that has made me kind of mad at the company.

How does this affect consultants that want to introduce docker to large corporations but small teams? A lot of scenarios become crappy now.

chrisandchris2• 5 years ago

Assuming that you currently don‘t need any other than the functionality the free plan provides, and assuming all 50 engineers need a license, your „a few hundred dollars“ is actually $1‘250/month just for getting the same as before.

I understand (in some way) the decision Docker made but I am not sure it is the way-to-go. However, it is a very hard question and if I had to pay a monthly fee for each component I‘m using to develop a solution, one or the other project would not even start because it‘s not worth it anymore.

mgkimsal• 5 years ago

(and I’d be happy to contribute to the effort)

Isn't paying their fee also contributing to the effort of what they've put in to it so far, and ideally what they'll do to keep it working and improve over time?

make3• 5 years ago

21$/month/user is nothing for the business setting.

speedgoose• 5 years ago

Between getting that approved and paid by the company or just using another tool, I will use another tool.

lamnk• 5 years ago

Yes, it's nothing for a single tool, even with hundreds or thousands of dev. But in total it quickly adds up for a lot of tools.

ash_while• 5 years ago

I made https://github.com/lime-green/remote-docker-aws a while ago and I've been happily using it for about a year. It throws docker in a ec2 VM and allows you to call docker as if it were running locally by tunneling and syncing files. The network file systems I tried (sshfs, nfs) were way too slow when used as docker volumes so it uses a tool called unison which does two-way file syncing (rsync only does one way, which is a problem for something like making django migrations)

dgellow2• 5 years ago

So you have a tool that your team use daily, but won’t pay a small license for it? I’m not sure I understand that logic. If the tool you have worked for you when it was free, it still works for you when you pay a small cost per month. Unless the cost is really that huge, I don’t see why that would be a reason to change.

yaitsyaboi• 5 years ago

Not only is he opposed to paying a license fee, he will contribute to the development of an entirely new, almost certainly worse, tool.

thinkharderdev3• 5 years ago

I think it is mostly the issue of dealing with byzantine corporate procurement processes. Also, it's really not all the clear what value-add Docker for Desktop is. Essentially it is just doing what you can do using the OSS components (running a Linux VM which runs the docker daemon and mounting a Unix socket on the host machine to talk to it). The only "value add" is a UI app on the host machine which I have never once used personally or witnessed anyone else using.

I certainly don't begrudge Docker for trying to create a sustainable business, but as an "open core" model it's really hard to understand what their proprietary extensions are that people will want to pay for. They took a stab at the container orchestration space with Docker Swarm (which you could definitely imagine having an "enterprise version") but that lost out pretty definitively to Kubernetes. So they're left with Docker Hub? That just doesn't seem like it will really be much of a revenue generator. You're either using whatever cloud container registry is available (ECR, GCR etc) or you're using a more general artifact repository like Artifactory, GitHub which can be a container registry as well as a Maven/NPM/etc artifact repository.

detaro2• 5 years ago

front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28368997

dang4• 5 years ago

Thanks!

Although that thread was posted earlier, I think we'll merge it into this one, on the principle that corporate press releases tend to make worse HN submissions. This is something of an exception to HN's original source rule.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

emptysongglass8• 5 years ago

Docker Desktop with developer environments would be a great value add if it supported Windows, macOS and Linux. As it is, we have developers in the company using Linux workstations so our Docker subscription is just for a registry.

We'll be moving soon given no forthcoming Linux client.

Macha5• 5 years ago

I wonder how many people just use docker desktop as a nicely packaged installer/VM manager? I know I don't use any of the other included tools, so can't see why I'd use docker desktop on Linux myself over just install docker from my package manager (or podman in my case)

justincormack5• 5 years ago

Hi, we have requests for Docker Desktop Linux, please upvote https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/39 and we are looking at the details of what we need to do to implement this.

emptysongglass8• 5 years ago

Thanks for listening, Justin. Looking forward to updates. I know it must be tough facing a lot of adversity from the community. I hope you guys continue playing to your strengths, improve customer support (number 1 in my book) and continue beefing out your product portfolio so companies like the one I work for can build healthy relationships with Docker, Inc.

frant-hartm• 5 years ago

If you are on Linux and using only the open-source bits (that's what I do) and have subscription for the registry, why would you be moving anywhere? What does this change bring that I am missing? As I understand it the change only affects Docker Desktop, which is for MacOS and Windows.

emptysongglass8• 5 years ago

It's not this change in particular, it's that you can get paid image registries with better customer support at a lower price point and higher availability. Docker needs to value add to their bare registry product otherwise they will be outcompeted by larger companies that can offer registries as part of a larger product suite.

Unfortunately, Docker's most valuable addition, developer environments, is only for two of the three OSes used most commonly by developers in a corporate environment. No company is going to adopt a feature that can only be used by two-thirds of its workforce.

glutamate2• 5 years ago

If Docker wants to grow up, maybe they could start with replying to support tickets from paying customers. I have a 10 day old open ticket with no reply.

emptysongglass8• 5 years ago

This has also been our experience with the company.

emptysongglass8• 5 years ago

I can no longer edit this comment but I just wanted to update that Docker the company has really made huge strides in the last few days to rectify our experience. So if you're having a hard time, reach out. My feeling speaking directly with some Docker people is that they're proud of the company and believe in its future.

justincormack5• 5 years ago

Hey sorry about that, can you send me the ticket details justin @ docker.com and I can look into it.

glutamate2• 5 years ago

I have a better idea. How about you look at EVERY open ticket, starting with those from paying customers?

EDIT: Wow, they actually did this and got back to me - thank you!

resizeitplz• 5 years ago

Fwiw, while there probably isn't a _good_ public relations response here ... N=1, when I see a company publicly managing escalation via public shaming, it inclines me to steer purchasing decisions away from them in the future.

adolph6• 5 years ago

Policy success is directly dependent on how we handle requests for exception. Granting exceptions undermines people’s sense of fairness, and sets a precedent precedent that undermines future policy. In environments where exceptions become normalized, leaders often find that issuing writs of exception—for policies they themselves have designed—starts to swallow up much of their time. Organizations spending significant time on exceptions are experiencing exception debt. The escape is to stop working the exceptions, and instead work the policy.

Larson, Will. An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (p. 122). Stripe Press. Kindle Edition.

mongol3• 5 years ago

It should not have to work like this.

mikestew• 5 years ago

So, like many companies, successful support consists of yelping at the appropriate public forum, be it Twitter or in this case, HN. Anything the public doesn't see: "due to unexpected call volume, you'll wait at least ten days before hearing from anyone". All the while the company forgets that the complaining customer isn't the only one reading. The rest of us are reading a live account of what company's customer support looks like.

nja• 5 years ago

Hah, tell me about it. We were unable to give them more money (buy more seats), and our urgent support request was open for a week. Turns out (from a moment's console snooping) it was a straightforward REST call that was missing a body parameter, so a simple 'curl' fixed the issue for us. But I wonder... how long they were actively hurting their business? And how did a serious bug like that get into production? What does that say about their systems?

lugged3• 5 years ago

They have core problems open from years ago they just ignore. This is their normal mode of operation.

throwawayy293• 5 years ago

I personally support Docker Desktop for Mac for an organization of 250-300 engineers.

I have been supporting it for 2 years now. Been through all the Docker Desktop upgrades, performance issues everytthing. I have researched docker performance on macs running k3d + k3s + istio and a bunch of microservices. I have had to jump into the internals of Docker daemon and docker cli and networking to solve how docker networks are provisioned for various proxying issues.

1. Docker dragged their feet with native performance for file syncing. We have to selectively enable it and just so that it doesn't bog the machine down.

2. When running it gets the CPU running at 75-80C, causing the fan to run non-stop at 3000 rpm at least. It is definitely impact by bad macbook pro design, which is terrible at airflow and heat sink activities

3. We were on unstable for a bit to test the new file syncing approach. Docker dropped that in stable and said "deal with it"

4. The paid forced upgrade notification means that I can't peg the Docker Desktop version for the whole org at a certain version.

5. Right after we switch from the unstable to stable, the next minor version is a breaking change.

6. Number 4 would be fine it docker would keep to their guarantee of stable being stable. They do a terrible job of being backwards compatible. The current stable we had was 3.3.1. With the constant minor upgrades, and pushing people, some people went to 3.6.0. (the latest as of yesterday, Aug 30) This broke everything inexplicable with just a VM error where k3d would keep crashing. I downgraded everyone back to 3.3.1 to get teams unblocked while waiting for me to find a fix.

7. Finding a fix usually involves waiting for Docker to prioritize something but at this point I don't trust that Docker know what it is doing.

I am currently pushing for Linux laptops, hosted dev environments and reducing the need to run distributed monoliths. We shall see.

stonecharioteer2• 5 years ago

I hope you do get the Linux Laptops through. I just joined s company that made an exception for me to use Linux and I haven't felt more valued ever. I never want to use another OS again.

Aicy• 5 years ago

I think it's unreasonable to expect so much from a company that doesn't make money.

The non-desktop docker product on it's own is crazy good, I think it's reasonable to expect docker desktop to improve once docker actually makes money from it and can afford to hire more engineers to work on it.

babaganoosh89• 5 years ago

So using the CLI is still free on Mac, just not the gui desktop app?

athorax2• 5 years ago

I believe "docker desktop" on mac includes all the various plumbing to get the docker cli working transparently (vs. running docker yourself in a VM)

mfer4• 5 years ago

Rancher Desktop is an open source container management and Kubernetes desktop app.

https://rancherdesktop.io/

Disclosure: I work on Rancher Desktop. Feedback welcome.

kristjansson8• 5 years ago

Seems interesting, but the name conflict with https://rancher.com/ is _very_ confusing. Is Rancher Desktop associated with the linked company?

mfer4• 5 years ago

Rancher Desktop is being build by Rancher (which is now part of SUSE).

adolph6• 5 years ago

Ok, I gave it a try. It's given me two K8s errors before any meaningful container work can be done. Not going to waste further time given a first run experience this bad. I'm interested in investing in my tools, not alpha-testing.

athorax2• 5 years ago

Probably shouldn't run tools in alpha status then

emptysongglass8• 5 years ago

You guys (by you guys I mean you and Docker, Inc) would do yourselves a huge favor not spiting the Linux devs who invented the technologies you build your tools on.

Where's the Linux version? Give it to me in Snap, AppImage, Flatpak, deb, or rpm, whatever you want. Just offer something. We'll take care of the rest.

41209• 5 years ago

It’s open source, you could probably port it yourself.

I somewhat agree with your viewpoint, but given Windows 10 is generally just Windows 10 , OSX is OSX… But Linux could be anything from Redhat to Alpine to a raspberry pi , I understand why devs wouldn’t support it

mfer4• 5 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. A Linux version is in the roadmap for this fall. I've had several discussions on it in the past week.

Part of this was due to priorities and part of it was technicalities. For example, do we put it in a VM so that way someone can easily blow things away and we don't touch the base system? We had to come to some direction on what we wanted to do there. Now that we have that idea we need to finish up one thing on Mac that will translate over to Linux.

The Linux side will be based on Lima[1] just as the Mac side is.

Earlier today I had a discussion on the packaging format.

[1] https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

mikl• 5 years ago

The whole reason this (and Docker Desktop) are used is that Docker and K8s does not run natively on macOS and Windows.

If you’re using Linux already, most of this stuff is as useful as nipples on a breastplate. You could theoretically run an emptied out husk of the app on Linux, but there are much better tools for working with the tools directly.

So I’d be greatly surprised if any Linux kernel hackers are miffed about this.

naikrovek5• 5 years ago

I installed this and could not get networking going again in WSL 2 until I uninstalled it. I was sad.

dwaite3• 5 years ago

I'm hitting https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop/issues/56... but will look again in the future.

thegagne• 5 years ago

Feedback:

1. There's very little "getting started" info here, you seem to assume everyone already runs kube everywhere else and already has workloads ready to go.

2. Not sure if this is feasible, but I'm looking for something that solves the Docker Desktop problem! I want something that can port map to a local port for testing, I want something that I can map a local folder to in order to store job input/output.

3. I tried starting it, and I'm already running Docker Desktop. It didn't seem to start a healthy kube cluster, and actually did nothing for me but just said it was waiting for the cluster. It might have been attempting to connect to old Docker kube clusters that I'm no longer running. Did I just need to wait longer? It wasn't clear.

aranw• 5 years ago

Does this work with Docker compose files? For local development at the moment I mostly use docker-compose and for production using AWS Fargate so the kubernetes functionality is a bit wasted on me really

GordonS3• 5 years ago

Can I run Docker Compose and Docker Swarm with this, or is only Kubernetes supported?

db3pt0• 5 years ago

Looking at the installation instructions for Docker on Mac/Windows, what is the expected way to install the Docker Engine without installing the Desktop bundle?

From https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/binaries/#install-cli...

The macOS binary includes the Docker client only. It does not include the dockerd daemon.

kristjansson8• 5 years ago

Docker Engine only runs on Linux.

Docker for Mac/Windows sets up a Linux VM using macOS/Windows native virtualization via the open-source HyperKit/VPNKit abstractions maintained by Docker-the-Company and the community. That VM runs Docker Enginer (dockerd) and all interaction (docker CLI commands, shared volumes, networking, etc.) are proxied into that VM.

OldTimeCoffee• 5 years ago

So unless I'm missing something important, why not just use docker engine directly on a wsl2 instance?

Ajedi32• 5 years ago

Yeah, that's the biggest issue; right now Docker Desktop is the only supported way of installing Docker on Windows: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/#supported-platforms That's literally the only reason I use it.

There's probably a fairly simple way to run Docker directly in WSL, but a lot of documentation is going to need to be updated to point to that method.

smarx007• 5 years ago

I think HN needs to update their algorithm. If there is a large number of upvotes and flags, flags should count as votes from some point on. More people need to see this post and discussion needs to happen instead of pushing it off the front page in less than an hour.

jameshart• 5 years ago

If this isn’t front page headline news on HN then something NZ gone very wrong, agreed.

Macha5• 5 years ago

I think since flags effect on ranking has becoming more known, there's more people using it as a post downvote, too.

detaro2• 5 years ago

Curious to see what that means for Windows containers. Microsoft is heavily recommending Docker there, but asking people to license another thing from a third party just to be able to use a feature on their expensive Windows licenses seems somewhat on the nose for them to push.

jrsj• 5 years ago

Maybe this is just a play to get Microsoft to acquire Docker lol

adolph6• 5 years ago

I wonder how much Docker is paying Synk.io for 200/mo Local vulnerability scans with Snyk?

cybrexalpha• 5 years ago

This seems like a bit of a footgun from Docker Inc. Those on Linux will just run Docker Engine (the open source part) directly, or move to alternatives like Podman. Docker Desktop only really has value on macOS and Windows, and there it's only because nobody wants to manage the glue to setup a Linux VM. Given the cost, I suspect many will chose to do that glue work themselves and I wouldn't be surprised to see an open source project spring up to do that.

Everything else is handled by other parts of the ecosystem already, image registries both private and public, orchestration, etc.

sascha_sl• 5 years ago

macOS is the hard one to solve. It does a lot of magic things in the background and Docker even created their own "distro" / VM build system, linuxkit, that went on to be useful in a lot of other places to make it work.

A lot of macOS developers imo seem to have more knowledge in their specific domain and less in how to wire up a VM to look seamless, they'll need the docker CLI to work with the local filesystem to keep a lot of existing Makefiles functional, I see a bunch of companies caughing up money in the short term just for that.

Docker Desktop on Windows itself proves quite well that WSL2 works fine for this use case.

duped• 5 years ago

The hype/buzzword driven development surrounding micro services/containerization has hit middle America and enterprises spend dumb amounts of money on related projects. I can see them spending more money on Docker Desktop with no difficulty, because the incentive is not to save money.

qeternity10• 5 years ago

It’s not the users who will be paying for it. Enterprises will bend over and take this 100%

Good move by Docker, financially speaking. They have little to lose.

coding1233• 5 years ago

It's a short sited move that will kill D.Desktop. It's not that these large corps don't have the money for this, it's how money is allocated in companies. Instead, now all hobby projects in large corp get killed fast and early because the hobbyist knows their project is doomed if the company isn't going to go for a new bill.

A whole bunch of scenarios die now.

dhagz• 5 years ago

Honestly, I don't see a reason to keep Docker for Mac installed on my computer. I haven't run a container workload locally in I don't know how long and I haven't built a container locally in even longer. It's just taking up space on my laptop and bugging me to update what seems like constantly.

remram• 5 years ago

There is a Docker Desktop for Linux? What does it do?

Why would I go out of my way to set up Docker differently on my dev machine compared to my servers? That seems like a recipe for failure.

simiones2• 5 years ago

Nope, there isn't (at this time, at least).

SilverRed2• 5 years ago

On MacOS and windows, using docker is a pain because you have to run a linux VM and set up networking and everything.

0x500x793• 5 years ago

Unless I am missing something this is pretty huge. Every company I have worked at that has issued MacBooks has had development environment instructions which outline using docker desktop (since it is the simplest solution). Given this headline every one of those companies would have needed to get licensing for that.

As others have stated: I am okay with attempting to monetize your work, but increasing prices like this (especially from free to a pretty pricey per-head subscription model) doesn't sit well with me. There doesn't seem to be much differentiation between the tier besides: "How many employees/revenue you have" and that is not my favorite line of charging.

Does this relate at all to the forced upgrades that were pushed earlier this year?

culpable_pickle• 5 years ago

Of course it does. Else you could downgrade to a pervious release with different licensing and not have to pay...

techthumb3• 5 years ago

I've been using Minikube's docker-engine and haven't missed DockerForMac for some time now.

Minikube sets up a Linux VM using MacOS Hypervisor.

It even has a convenience command to configure docker-cli/docker-client.

  $ minikube docker-env
    export DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY="1"
    export DOCKER_HOST="tcp://192.168.65.11:2376"
    export DOCKER_CERT_PATH="/Users/wibble/.minikube/certs"
    export MINIKUBE_ACTIVE_DOCKERD="minikube"

For corporate situations where MITM proxies are used, you can inject/trust custom CAs using

  $ minikube start --embed-certs

https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/handbook/untrusted_certs/

jackcviers3• 5 years ago

Before Docker Desktop there existed a solution called docker toolkit that worked exactly like this. The only problem is that occasionally internal corporate networks will use the same ip address and you have to customize that by building your own docker engine.

deusex_• 5 years ago

But what minikube backend are you using for this? The preferred one is Docker and all the others are also paid on Mac.

techthumb3• 5 years ago

I am using "hyperkit"

Available options:

  --driver='': Driver is one of: virtualbox, parallels, vmwarefusion, hyperkit, vmware, docker, ssh (defaults to auto-detect)

TheDong2• 5 years ago

all the others are also paid on Mac

Hyperkit is open source software that works on macOS.

https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/drivers/hyperkit/

Virtualbox is also a free (as in beer, and mostly libre) driver that works on all of windows/linux/macOS

thinkharderdev3• 5 years ago

Hyperkit, which is incidentally also what Docker for Mac uses.

thinkharderdev3• 5 years ago

Yeah, I used minikube for local dev on k8s services and ended up just using it for all Docker stuff after a while. It is slightly less ergonomic than Docker for Mac though especially with respect to DNS and network issues. For instance, the minikube VM and any containers running in it cannot by default use the host machines VPN, so if you have to connect to an external service over your corporate VPN then you need to do some extra config (which isn't very well documented) to make it work. And the setup I ended up using was to use the VPNKit socket that was part of Docker for Mac to make it work. Now VPNKit is also OSS so I'm sure you can get it to work without Docker for Mac at all but it's also not trivial.

jtagx• 5 years ago

Copy Paste install instructions for macOS: https://gist.github.com/rmetzger/e556bfda8082bceeae6a32e7e02...

coding1233• 5 years ago

As weird as it might seem, Microsoft would probably be the best company to acquire Docker at this point.

They could probably turn this around a bit into a free with Windows, pay for Linux (at the 250 employee level - possibly up the employee count to 500 though).

hbn3• 5 years ago

free with Windows, pay for Linux

Isn't Docker Desktop (i.e. the part being sold) just a client that sets up a Linux VM to run the free part?

orthoxerox2• 5 years ago

Nah, they should just build a vscode plugin that makes it easy to manage docker running inside WSL2. Bam, Docker Desktop is a beached whale.

raman1622• 5 years ago

It's shameful that this product was once free is now going to be charged, even if it's only for larger businesses.

I wonder how sustainable it is for docker to be like other open source entities and rely on consistent donations from major corporations to rely on income.

I also wonder if this will impede on docker adoption in the coming months. I guess time is the only one that can tell

andrewmcwatters2• 5 years ago

Shameful? What's shameful about it? Software entitlement is outrageous. It's the only field where people expect professionals to keep doling out labor for free and then complain about the free stuff.

If it isn't already abundantly clear to you: free software isn't sustainable. It's built on the backs of people who provide it for whatever reason they choose.

This be a beggar so I can continue to have free stuff mentality has got to go.

raman1622• 5 years ago

Shameful may have been a harsh word , disappointing is more appropriate.

The disappointing part is that a product that was once free and distributed in abundance is now requiring licensing starting immediately for small businesses. There is a transition gap but the policy is effective starting today. There were no added features of value, it was just a random change of price from nothing to something.

I think the new enterprise features that they are boasting about which is probably where they would end up making most of their money could have been suffice as this new policy is going to be difficult for them to enforce.

I'm sure docker desktop originally being free contributed to them being this popular. It made using containers for development super easy on windows and Mac.

Now that they have the huge user base, they're in a good position to dictate terms in their favour whether we like it or not.

benjaminwootton• 5 years ago

Docker have never done the one obvious thing to monetise - an upsell and enterprise support for the engine.

Trying to be a poor mans pivotal was a stupid strategy, and developer tools is awkward too.

I’m convinced if they charged $10 per engine per month they would have kept all of the goodwill and momentum and been the next VMWare.

V99• 5 years ago

They tried that ("Docker Enterprise Edition") years ago, with some minor differentiation on features only available in EE... but for $62-300/node/month. This is now the part Mirantis owns, current Docker is the developer-focused side.

https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-enterprise-edition/

https://web.archive.org/web/20171118161452/https://www.docke...

sneak2• 5 years ago

The engine on Windows is nonfree (both cost and freedom).

qeternity10• 5 years ago

So many people in this thread don’t understand how enterprise decisions get made.

The business license costs $21/month, probably less in reality.

Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?

Any alternative has switching costs and risks. Companies will just pay this. I see so many people saying “just do these 10 steps and it’s basically the same”. It just ain’t worth it for $250

gfiorav2• 5 years ago

Exactly. This makes sense.

USD 21 per user/month + bulk discount is nothing.

If companies want to roll their own they can, but most won't. Docker Desktop adds a lot of value if only by removing the hassle for quick os-agnostic development.

eptcyka3• 5 years ago

What is the value add for Docker Desktop?

In a world where podman exists, what's the point of docker on dev machines anyway?

swiftcoder• 5 years ago

That sort of depends on the size of business under discussion. If you are a Fortune 500 with 2,000 engineers who all need licenses... half a million in licensing costs is not always the easiest sell.

Of course, that fortune 500 is going to pick up the phone and demand to pay 1/4 of that (and they'll probably get it). Enterprise sales is fun

otterley• 5 years ago

*Actual fun may vary.

otabdeveloper4• 5 years ago

The places where I worked there's an inverse relationship - the smaller the cost, the harder it is to justify with finances. ($4000 monthly AWS bill for "testing purposes"? No questions asked. $10 wireless mouse? Mission impossible!)

qeternity10• 5 years ago

Exactly. Cost is a proxy for importance (usually). I can’t be bothered to approve your $10 mouse, but I can be bothered to approve your $10k AWS budget.

WhatsName• 5 years ago

In case you aren't aware, it's easy to explain by that fact that most finance departments are afraid to question your spendings on grounds of looking incompetent.

So it's less about 10$ and more about: "I understand what a wireless mouse is and it doesn't look mission critical to me."

"No idea what those items on that AWS bill mean, but I'll probably be better off not asking"

pharindoko• 5 years ago

;D damn right…. Wanted to buy a css framework extension for 50$ - Mission impossible ..

namdnay• 5 years ago

That’s assuming some kind soul in engineering management has the patience and leverage to guide this through 10 layers of purchasing, procurement, finance, legal etc…

Another likely outcome is that it’s “easier” for teams to switch to another tool (easier in that at least they’re not waiting on a third party for approval) and everyone loses a lot of time

Big corporations are not the most efficient beasts for this kind of situation

jdwithit• 5 years ago

This poster has clearly worked at the same kind of companies I have. Plenty of them would gladly burn 10x what it would cost to just buy the damn license on engineering man-hours switching something that's inferior but free. Because it doesn't show up as an expense on the annual budget.

The concept of opportunity cost is completely lost on a lot of business leaders.

marcosdumay• 5 years ago

This.

Buying anything on my organization costs something around $10k. Add your price to this to discover the total we are spending.

That's on financial cost. The opportunity cost of stopping technical people to handle the technical details of an acquisition is just huge, and larger the most differentiation there is on the market.

CyanLite22• 5 years ago

Perhaps you're not understanding corporate bureaucracy. Nobody wants to be the manager who gets fired for trying to save $25k by switching from Docker Desktop to {insert random open source project here}. Not only is it not worth the time or the risk, but the engineering manager's exact purpose is to traverse the corporate bureaucracy. It gives them job security. Plus the engineering manager can negotiate big discounts with the vendor and can brag about that on their own performance reviews.

PragmaticPulp• 5 years ago

I've been fortunate enough to work at companies where engineers were trusted to make small purchasing decisions. It works well for a while, but eventually everyone accumulates a lot of random recurring charges and the company cracks down.

$21 is nothing for a one-time spend.

$21 per month per employee is now $252/year per employee, but now you also need someone managing all of these licenses and accounting. Every new employee or team change requires some juggling of licenses with associated turn-around times before that person can get started.

It's not bad when it's just a couple key pieces of software, but it doesn't take long before every engineer has some mix of 20 different subscription tools and platforms and licenses and you're on the phone with a different vendor every week doing the annual subscription renewal pricing negotiation dance. The sales people know how this works and would prefer to wear you down with endless conference calls until you get tired of negotiating and just pay the new, higher price they're asking.

Soon, all of those "cheap" tools have added up to $1000/month or more per employee with a couple people dedicated to managing these licenses and negotiating with vendors all of the time. And it's terrible.

When the tool isn't easily replaceable, you deal with it. I'm not sure I see that with Docker Desktop, though. When you get a new hire, do you tell them to submit a ticket with licensing and wait until they can get their Docker Desktop license? Or do you simply write some documentation about how to accomplish tasks without using Docker Desktop so you can remove another external dependency? Teams generally gravitate toward the latter.

posterboy• 5 years ago

Big corporations are not the most efficient beasts for this kind of situation

What situation, being trapped? I'm not sure what size has to do with it. Are small corporations maybe more ... agile?

OJFord• 5 years ago

It's very impactful though, it'll probably be people seeing it as highly visible and career-advancing who manage to muster the 'patience and leverage'.

If the org's been thoughtful to in advance, it's at the level of being almost an operational risk - all of engineering uses this tool, tool's licence or pricing might change, retooling has an associated cost and down-time.

ithkuil• 5 years ago

You can drill through layers of that crap if you can sell something through aws marketplace or equivalent thing that your company is already set up to spend millions a month.

Not sure how would that work for a desktop tool. It's in them to figure that out though

staticassertion• 5 years ago

I really doubt that procurement is going to be harder than switching a technology out.

wintermutestwin2• 5 years ago

OpEx is much easier to get vs CapX. That's why so many things are subscription now. (also Sarbaines Oxley pushed vendors into subscription models)

mc32• 5 years ago

Sometimes you can put these things on CC rather than P.O.

argomo• 5 years ago

Heh heh... so true it hurts. Why spend 3 years pushing it past risks reviews and oversight committees when you could just write a crappy version that does what you need?

Legal alone will spend months looking at run-of-the-mill software contacts trying to negotiate absurd concessions from vendors in situations where they clearly have no bargaining power.

We can spend a lot of money on Oracle for their profoundly obtuse products though.

racecar789• 5 years ago

Easier method to deal with monthly payment...Create a purchase order with 12 lines. One line for each month with dollar amounts defined. The purchase order serves as the "approval" so Accounts Payable can process without asking for coding information.

Example: I only have to revisit licensing once a year, to create a new 12 line purchase order. It's still a pain but I prefer purchase orders vs dealing with credit cards. In addition, querying expense history for purchase order lines provides far more detail vs querying a credit card platform. Credit card history tends to go into a black hole.

One possible hitch...Some companies might restrict Accounts Payable from receiving purchase orders for separation-of-duties reasons.

malux85• 5 years ago

Yep, I’ve been there, I was a consultant in London charging 700 pounds a day, and my hands were tied because of a silly 50 USD license expense and couldn’t work for a month.

I asked if I could just pay it myself, but was told that would violate the IT department guidelines and possibly an SLA too, so I just sat there for a month, reminding everyone at the daily stand ups I was blocked. I couldn’t believe it.

I was not the only one who was tied in red tape there, it was indeed normal.

This company was making 600 million a year in profit.

efsavage• 5 years ago

Many engineers at large companies won't want to bother dealing with the headaches around licensing software and spending money, whether it's $2/mo or $21/mo or $200/mo.

If it's a core part of my job and the best option available, it'd be worth it, but if there's any reasonable alternative, I'll go download that today instead of wading through all of the lawyers and approvals and compliance to use something slightly better.

dheera• 5 years ago

If you're getting started, sure.

If you already have a live deployment then the company's bigger fear is the a risk of switching to a completely new infrastructure and they'll all of a sudden push the paperwork quickly to stay on their existing codebase.

tjpnz• 5 years ago

Even when the purchase process has been streamlined it's still a headache for a piece of software I might only use 1-2 times a year.

fmakunbound• 5 years ago

It’s not at all about the price. Obviously a corporation can afford that. It’s the sheer dread of even starting the procurement process in your average corporation that your average developer must overcome, that is the barrier.

I’d rather investigate an alternative like running it on a VM than deal with that. Actually I’d rather shave my face with some mace in the dark than deal with that.

Cacti• 5 years ago

lol obviously you’ve never worked in a giant bureaucratic corporation.

dang4• 5 years ago

Please don't post personal swipes or unsubstantive comments.

If you know more than other people, that's great, but then please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. If you can't do that or don't want to, that's fine, but then please don't post.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

qeternity10• 5 years ago

Lol obviously you’ve never risen to a level of management in a giant corporation.

It’s ok. Just keep telling yourself you’re smarter than everyone else.

regularfry• 5 years ago

I honestly don't think I could get Docker Desktop through our procurement process before the end of the grace period. It's not a matter of "this is peanuts" as much as "we're guaranteed to breach the license terms if we keep using this thing, so everyone has to get off it now." And then once it's gone, we'll limp along with whatever plugs the gap until something else emerges a as a winner, which probably won't be Docker Desktop.

truffdog2• 5 years ago

This reminds me of the genius of AWS. The engineering team can just buy whatever they want, no questions asked.

stevebmark2• 5 years ago

What companies are offering $250k/year for engineers?

yellowbkpk• 5 years ago

At least Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft.

ArchOversight• 5 years ago

When you add up salary + benefits + workplace amenities + taxes + software licenses and whatnot, you get there mighty quick.

adolph6• 5 years ago

TCO ain't paycheck offer

Salary + Taxes (Payroll, etc) + Fringe (Healthcare, etc) + Dev licenses + Training/conferences = paycheck * (n > 1.5)

cebert3• 5 years ago

It seems like 200k+ is pretty typical for Engineers with at least some experience even in less hot markets like the Midwest. I know several developers in the Metro Detroit area making more than 200k base.

bazooka_penguin• 5 years ago

Pretty much any company operating in a major US city.

ryandvm• 5 years ago

I think you're correct about existing users at large corporations. Converting all those into paid accounts is a no-brainer.

However, this will have a massive change on the competitive landscape. For companies that haven't yet adopted Docker, this is a huge red checkmark. This change is going to spur development on open source alternatives like nothing else could.

qeternity10• 5 years ago

Nah. We're not 250 people. We use docker, and we won't stop/switch because of it.

This is such a good problem to have. I would love to cut Docker Inc. a check.

And we've basically moved over to garden (a k8s dev env) anyway. But we still use docker plenty.

aprdm• 5 years ago

That math changes a lot in companies that don’t sell tech as their profits margin aren’t as fat. It also changes when you have 1000s of developers.

isoprophlex• 5 years ago

That's not how it works in my experience. If it costs more than 0 but less than 10k, the pencil pushers at procurement wont even answer your emails...

andix• 5 years ago

From my experience: Yes, they may jeopardize it.

If docker and containerization is not yet widely used in the company, a lot of decisionmakers will not buy it, because they did fine without it for decades ;)

jandrese2• 5 years ago

It's not the amount of money that is the issue, the issue is that it this wasn't budgeted into the project when it was proposed 2 years ago. It is software that falls under category S which means you can't use overhead funds it has to be a category S purchase, but you have no category S funds budgeted to the project because you were using free software.

Being so cheap actually complicates the matters even more, since the finance people don't really want to mess with purchases less than $5,000, even though it is their own rule that requires all software to go through them regardless of cost. It just means they won't be willing to help very much.

tyingq• 5 years ago

Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?

Tech companies? No, they will probably cough up until they have another solution.

IT departments in non-tech companies? Yes. I fully expect a circus there. Many won't have known it was being used, purchasing will have their ego bruised by a company "hijacking" them and won't want to pay, and so on.

raffraffraff• 5 years ago

True. Absolutely. But I guarantee you that this headline means that even junior "devops" engineers will have workable alternatives by tomorrow, and can tell you how to implement them with little friction.

captainmuon• 5 years ago

I guess it depends on the enterprise. I can imagine the thoughts of certain managers: Recurring costs? Something that used to be free and now they want money? Pricing per user? More expensive than Office 365?

mike_hock• 5 years ago

Which is why this shady tactic works time and again.

katzgrau• 5 years ago

That would be the wise thing to do, but I'm sure there are some ways companies will eff it up anyway. Survival of the fittest I guess.

Management may want some badge of honor for saving a budget line item. Or developers may want to embark on a new and interesting project and successfully convince management it's a good idea, who will agree for a wide range of reasons (not pissing off developers might be one of them).

Both will ignore the risk and considerable downsides. Happens all the time.

jpambrun• 5 years ago

I think you don't understand how big company procurement work. Getting legal's and procurement's attention to look at this is more effort than its worth. The logistics of managing licenses, single sign-on, etc is a nightmare. Besides, running docker is already frowned upon by InfoSec and require special permission. It will never happen where I work. Not because of money, but because it's too much trouble.

Aqueous• 5 years ago

$21 / user / month - so if you have 100 engineers that's $2100 a month or $25k a year.

Still should be doable for most businesses that size but licensing costs can blow up when you start to have a lot of seats. An annoying thing about the company I work for is that they have a limited number of licenses for things like IDEs, so they ration them. And so I'll boot up an IDE for a language I work in less - like say, PyCharm - and it will stop working because my license got taken away and given to someone else. I'll have to request another one be given back to get working again, which is pretty annoying when I'm trying to get something done. I work mostly with Docker / Kubernetes so if I'm in a situation where my core tools are being constantly taken away, I'll be pretty miffed.

I agree that Docker has every right to charge big companies for this software. Just wanted to point out that the costs can be more than you'd expect.

roguecoder• 5 years ago

That price is per person, not total. The highest total I've heard so far is going to cost that company $108k a month, for a development tool.

VCs are shooting themselves in the foot here: it is very obvious that we should never adopt any technical tool backed by VC, because they will eventually try to make us an offer we can't refuse and then go out of business shortly thereafter when their extortion attempt doesn't work.

qeternity10• 5 years ago

That price is per person, not total. The highest total I've heard so far is going to cost that company $108k a month, for a development tool.

Lol yes, I know. My point was the cost of meatware is 3 orders of magnitude greater than the software, and likely less at scale.

$100k/mo would mean 5,000 devs. I highly doubt a company with overheads near/in excess of a billion dollars/year is going to sweat a $1m expense for core infra like Docker.

0xbadcafebee• 5 years ago

Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?

Not just "think" - I know for a fact.

Finance refuses to spend money if there is a "free" alternative, and Architecture rejects all software that isn't OSS licensed without a lengthy review process. It would take us at least 3 months to get approvals and POs for all the devs, if it even got approved, but more likely it would be in "batches" of licenses, further delaying roll-out. So instead the devs are beginning to install Linux VMs to run Docker from, or looking at podman.

People forget that just because there's a "rational" decision, doesn't mean people (or businesses) will choose it. Businesses are run by humans, and humans are irrational and dumb. Path of least resistance wins.

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

The business license costs $21/month

No, it costs $21/user/month.

Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?

I work for a big enterprise that is currently going through a transition that is simultaneously a cloud transition and a transition to more critically consider tooling with license management overhead (which for a $21/seat license, is probably a significantly larger cost in a big, bureaucratic enterprise than the license cost itself.)

That said, there's a good argument that the things that you get for that $21/seat are things many enterprises will find are still worth the license cost + license management overhead. On the other hand, most of that is stuff that doesn't scale with number of developer seats, so a subscription model that doesn't work on that basis and therefore doesn't impose the kind of license management overhead that per-seat licensing does would probably net Docker more revenue while imposing less total costs on enterprises.

qeternity10• 5 years ago

No, it costs $21/user/month.

Do you guys not realize that I know that? I did the maths standardized to one seat.

I’m not also suggesting that the entire engineering spend for 100+ person companies is $250k/year.

Do the analysis on a per unit cost because that’s how life works: per unit cost of human capital and per unit cost of software vs. per unit value creation.

ShakataGaNai• 5 years ago

Yes, yes they would. And they do. Regularly.

When you've spent enough time in the IT Department, you'll see companies demand that you "cut laptop costs" or similar. Because when you're buying 250 laptops a year, the people with the budgets go "OMG we're spending half a million a year on laptops". So changes are made to the configuration, maybe small SSD but often times it'll be something like less RAM, or slower CPU - because purchasing controls aren't that fine. Great, you've now cut $200 per laptop and the money people are excited to see you've saved $50,000/year.

Do they understand that now there are 250 people, which probably all cost more than $100,000/year, whom aren't quite as efficient as they could be? Nope. And they don't care. The budget says you get X. The personnel cost is attributed in some other category not to be touched.

Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this product. It's not in budget."

Lastly the per-employee cost adds up. It's $11/mo for SSO. $18/mo for email suite. $19/mo for Gitlab. $14/mo for Jira. $5/mo for Confluence. $3/mo just to put SAML on Jira & Confluence. $8/mo for Password vault. $12/mo for Slack. $17/mo fro Zoom. $17/mo for Lucidchart. $12/mo for Laptop MDM. That's not everything an employee needs, heck it doesn't even cover HR products (Workday? 15Five? Applicant Tracking?), Training (probably a couple of those), EDR/AV for laptops, and dozens of other smaller services. Sure adding another $21/mo isn't going to change the number a lot on an individual basis, but it adds up really fast when you multiply it out across all your Developers.

And don't forget. How do you rationalize that your container software costs more than your source code control solution? One of those two things you can very easily live without... and it's Docker.

eitland• 5 years ago

You basically typed out what I feel.

Let me add something useful here and say that it even has a name:

"subscription fatigue"

I was fine paying Netflix for an all-I-can-watch even if I ended up watching less than a DVDs worth of content just for the convenience of not keeping a stack of DVDs around.

I'm not fine with paying Netflix, HBO, Disney, my cable provider, NRK (state owned broadcastee,mandatory) etc etc a monthly or yearly fee.

So I just drop it: it is not like I need to watch it.

Same with tools: I'm happy to bug my company to pay for IntelliJ as long as NetBeans is stuck in its current spot, we already pay for Jira and Confluence but I am always seeking out the open source solutions, - partially because I'm old enough to realize that $n in subscription means $n x 12 x m devs a year, partially no cost open source (contrary to popular belief here) is less hassle and partially because going proprietary feels like paying Dane geld.

Edit:

Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this product. It's not in budget."

Probably true in most places and it is sometimes a problem.

But that institutional hesitation is also a powerful defense against every vendor who wants to inject themselves somewhere and then start jacking up the prices.

seneca2• 5 years ago

A company with 100 $250k/year engineers would be billed about $250k/year for this license. Any half competent manager is going to realize that money would be better spend on a single engineer focused on tooling, who can replace Docker Desktop in addition to working on other efficiency improvements.

qeternity10• 5 years ago

A company with 100 $250k/year engineers would be billed about $250k/year for this license

Would love to know how you arrived at this number.

The list price for 100 engineers on the most expensive plan would be $25k/year and I guarantee Docker will do volume discounts.

Additionally, the terms just say you need a paid plan, which presumably could be the cheapo $5/mo plan which would be $6k/year for 100 engineers.

__s• 5 years ago

I work at a large company. I added a USE_PODMAN environment variable for devs to use within an hour of finding out about this

But maybe my company is too large; large enough companies can have smaller teams, other teams will probably go the licensing route

ryan_lane• 5 years ago

Local dev environments are used because it's what people are used to, and they're low friction to start using. The problem is that they're actually quite difficult to maintain at scale. Large businesses spend a considerable amount of time debugging local developer environments. Cloud IDEs have been popping up and are finally to the point of being usable (and in some cases even better than a local dev env).

My company was already somewhat interested in checking out hosted IDEs, and today this pushed us to start some proof of concepts to move some teams over to github's codespaces.

So, yes, businesses will adjust their workflows to avoid the cost since many were already interested in improving their workflows and relieving some of the burden on their developer environment tooling teams.

fnord77• 5 years ago

Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?

YES! I've seen it. Stinginess at my shop regularly causes hours and hours of pricey engineering resources to address problems caused by underallocating cloud resources to the point things fail - or refusal to allow some cloud service because it will cost $100/month (despite saving 10s of thousands in eng resources)

It's crazy but I bet it happens many places.

Spooky233• 5 years ago

Absolutely.

The pricing model for this is really stupid. A $21/mo subscription is a pain in the ass — they would be better off just selling it perpetual for $1000.

I ran a big enterprise shop for years. Nuisance licensing like this costs a fortune - I’d need to go do legal review, have it tracked for renewals and compliance, etc. Freemium product like this is always coupled with a stupid license enforcement audit that appears and tries to extort you. For a small quantity, overhead may be more than the product.

As an enterprise consumer, it makes me question the viability of the company. $250 a year is priced to allow unit managers to use P-Cards to avoid procurement processes. It’s too cheap to make meaningful amounts of money, so unless it’s a way to shift me to a more intelligent model, I’d have folks assigned to investigate alternatives.

tempodox• 5 years ago

I love the term “nuisance licensing”. Considering how everyone and their grandmother is switching to subscription models I wonder why it didn't come up earlier.

TeeMassive2• 5 years ago

Yeah that's great in theory. In practice you have to go to the official route (tm). Here's some of my experiences:

1) Internship at a well known tech corporation. I was on a project that would accelerate the debugging and diagnostic of a machine the whole factory depended on; tl;dr I was making an app to replace an overgrown Excel sheet. To do that we used an opensource library but the catch was that the maintainer made its money by placing the documentation under a paywall. At some point the project was going well but the leftovers from Google Code could not do anymore. So it took two months (TWO MONTHS!) to do a $15 USD one time payment with the company's credit card. Apparently the process took longer due to the fact we had to go through PayPal.

2) Another multi billion corporation, less big but still multinational. They spent hours and lots of money on internal propaganda to promote their "core values"; which of course included "agility". We wanted to buy a commercial code analysis tool to save time during code reviews and increase code quality of a code base where ~30 devs worked. No brainier right? We had the R&D department's VP's OK to buy the damn thing and ask for forgiveness to the mother ship later. After 6 months our team leader was still receiving calls and and form to fill. "Do you really need this? Did you think about other products? Did you have the OK from this person thousand of miles away and this other person who speaks in a very broken English?" Using the company's internal organism and salary tables we estimated that during those six months they have wasted about 5 years of licensing in salary.

patmcc• 5 years ago

>>Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?

Hahahahaha, yes, absolutely. Because if the wrong VP gets this in his head, it's not $250/year, it's "almost half a million dollars over 3 years" for the 500 employees or whatever. I've seen it happen.

dominotw• 5 years ago

$250k/year

fuck..i need to find a new job

lmilcin• 5 years ago

You are using logic.

That's not how corporations work.

I work remotely for large corporation (over 100k employees) and it wastes on average an hour of my productivity every day on stupid stuff. For example my office PC becomes unavailable every time it gets an update, at least once a week. They force restart during working hours. If there is somebody in the office I can call them to reboot it, if not I have to drive there. Everybody has the same problem. Meetings are disrupted, plans are thrown in disarray, people are loosing sometimes entire day of work.

The problem has been known before covid and has not been solved.

Any normal logical person would throw resources into solving the problem, but the people responsible just say they are busy and why is that a big problem if you can just press reboot?

martin-adams• 5 years ago

I once got told my my manager to reduce the cost of my email inbox on the server and download it to my local machine.

This was email provided and owned by the very company I worked for, and it was costing enough for management to care.

Maybe enterprises have changed since then, but I wouldn’t be surprised if stuff like this does start asking questions as it’s a new cost on a budget.

dolmen3• 5 years ago

(Big) Enterprises nowadays have mandatory backups for emails. So downloading e-mails on clients doesn't remove the need of storing on the server.

GordonS3• 5 years ago

Have you ever worked at a large corporation?

I have, and let me tell you, they will spend dozens of hours and thousands of dollars to fight a purchase of $21. I'm really not joking.

ben7799• 5 years ago

We use Docker Desktop for the Mac at work. (Large company)

Docker for Mac absolutely sucks. If they’re going to force everyone to pay they better start fixing bugs.

They recently stopped allowing skipping a release unless you pay, and then promptly shipped a point release with a showstopper bug.

I literally asked IT for a Linux VM/Cloud machine yesterday for development because my Mac is dead in the water due to a bug. It’s time efficient to develop on the Mac if it works, but the overall experience is terrible compared to Linux on the desktop IMO.

SilasX2• 5 years ago

They recently stopped allowing skipping a release unless you pay, and then promptly shipped a point release with a showstopper bug.

Whoa, really? Is this written up somewhere?

My first "WTF" with docker was in Fall 2015 when we dockerized our app and had it nicely set up so we could tell employees "run this command and the app Just Works" ... and then they introduced a breaking change to the format of docker compose files so it just mysteriously stopped working in the middle of the day.

Rebelgecko• 5 years ago

They might be referring to this? https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/183

nagyf• 5 years ago

They recently stopped allowing skipping a release unless you pay

I honestly thought that's a bug. That is so ridiculous if that's intentional. I agree with your post and have similar experiences with Docker for Mac

stusmall2• 5 years ago

After they introduced that feature I hit a bug where it would try to force an upgrade to version "null" and then crash. I ended up having to uninstall and reinstall it to get things usable again.

steviedotboston• 5 years ago

I have to restart Docker for Mac multiple times a day. I'm surprised there hasn't been a community driven open source alternative yet

drocer88• 5 years ago

Singularity ( https://singularity.hpcng.org/user-docs/master/introduction.... ) is a platform that lets you create and run containers. Source is on github : https://github.com/hpcng/singularity

hda11110• 5 years ago

podman-remote with a Linux VM?

yurishimo• 5 years ago

Yeah, that's probably not gonna happen. At the scale Docker is operating at now, the reason the Mac app sucks, is because it's really hard. They already have the resources to throw at this problem now and this is the product we have.

This is purely a $$$ move (which is fine) but we shouldn't expect an order of magnitude more work going into the product as a result of this move, imo.

devoutsalsa2• 5 years ago

If you expect me to pay for it, it better work well enough to not be a blocker to my critical job path workflow.

nicce• 5 years ago

They are still looking for their business model, because they have no money. They have been unprofitable for their whole existence.

smoldesu2• 5 years ago

The Docker experience is (and has been) subopar on MacOS. With the way Apple Silicon is headed, I don't really have much faith that the situation is going to get better, and I really wonder if the Mac client is even a priority for them at this point.

SketchySeaBeast3• 5 years ago

I've found Docker Desktop to be equally awful with Windows. You'd think they'd care about giant swathes of the market like that.

Ansil849• 5 years ago

I've found Docker Desktop to be equally awful with Windows. You'd think they'd care about giant swathes of the market like that.

The fact that they don't care, and yet you (or if not you, others) still use it, succinctly explains why they do not care.

If they have a shitty, buggy client for Mac/Windows, and people complain about it but still use it, then they have no incentive to care.

matsemann3• 5 years ago

Wish they fixed the issue where it uses all available RAM even when running no containers yet.

nickjj5• 5 years ago

I've found it to be really good on Windows 10 Pro, even with 6 year old hardware.

I've been using it full time since 2018 and it's been nothing but really fast and as stable as you can ask for given how complex of a tool it is. It rarely crashes (maybe once every few months) and I've built thousands of images across many different tech stacks.

jandrese2• 5 years ago

We de-dockerized our Windows deployments because it was causing no end of headaches for the end users.

watermelon02• 5 years ago

In my experience, minikube (hyperkit) performs better than DockerForMac Kubernetes, if we ignore mounting of macOS folders to the VM.

xtracto• 5 years ago

I got bitten by a Mac bug a couple of months ago: The latest version of Docker desktop didn't work for something (don't remember anymore) so I had to revert to a previous version and work in that for several months now.

stusmall2• 5 years ago

I recently switched jobs and made sure I wasn't going to get a mac again just because of Docker Desktop. At my last job, we had an application that did some very strange things with the Docker API. It regularly crash or lock up the VM or hit subtle correctness bugs in networking.

I get the problem they are trying to solve is extremely difficult. I don't think I'd do much better trying to seamlessly ship a very Linux-centric API on Mac and Windows. They have my sympathy but that doesn't mean I'll use the product given a choice.

stonecharioteer2• 5 years ago

I'm the only person at my company who asked for a Linux machine. And I got it. Everyone else is on an M1. I said no. I don't want to use a Mac ever again. I had a Mac for 2 years at my previous company, one of those 2018 monstrousities. Never again.

I asked for a P14 AMD Ryzen 7 5850H ThinkPad. Its still en route. But until then I'm using my Dell G5 SE Ryzen 7 4800H laptop with Manjaro. Best dev experience I've ever had at a company. The dev machine adds to the package IMO. If you're not getting the tools you want, you're not being paid enough ever.

tunesmith• 5 years ago

Our team uses it too, but we don't even use the UI - it's just to get the daemon started on startup. Is there a way to do this easily on the Mac without using Docker Desktop?

dwaite3• 5 years ago

you could check something like ubuntu multipass

sixothree4• 5 years ago

Docker for Windows isn't particularly stellar either. For instance, you have to actually log in to a machine to have a docker image running. Additionally only one user on a machine can run the host application at any given time.

I have no idea how this is popular.

naikrovek5• 5 years ago

That isn't the case on Windows Server, and on Windows Desktop SKUs, having a logged in user is normal and expected.

erikkri• 5 years ago

This seems like a relevant link: https://medium.com/crowdbotics/a-complete-one-by-one-guide-t...

berdon• 5 years ago

This is likely the most realistic path forward for most developers using MBPs.

jcoder2• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, it looks like work is also underway to deprecate and remove `docker-machine`: https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/245

YetAnotherNick• 5 years ago

I don't get it. There still seems to be a free version, which includes bundled docker engine, right? I think this is the only part of docker desktop that most devs need. Private repos were always a paid feature AFAIK.

The concerning text written is "Limited image pulls per day". What's the limit here?

andrewmcwatters2• 5 years ago

Of course it's already obvious how successful Docker is in terms of consumption, but it's even more clear in this thread how successful Docker is.

Look at how many complaints there are, and people still use it.

CyanLite22• 5 years ago

Surprised no one like Microsoft has stepped in to buy Docker out-right.

peytoncasper• 5 years ago

There reality of this is that Docker is setting themselves up as an enterprise software business. Like the one they spun out a short while ago.

You as a developer won’t be involved with purchasing Docker subscriptions. Instead they’ll have sales teams that approach your IT department who will pay for support reasons and pre install Docker Desktop on all company hardware.

That’s why this is only focused at larger companies. This gives IT departments someone to call when a developer reports a problem.

krzyk• 5 years ago

I'm a bit puzzled what costs and what not, as it is a first time I see "Docker Desktop" name.

I use docker on linux, mainly executing "docker build", "docker run", etc.

Does it still cost if I do it in a 1k+ company during work?

vlunkr• 5 years ago

The article says there are no changes to the command line tool. This is the first time I'm hearing of Docker Desktop as well.

treesknees2• 5 years ago

Docker Desktop is the only way to run Docker "natively" on Windows and MacOS (I say "natively" because it's really using a linux VM behind the scenes.)

So if you're on Linux, nothing has changed (yet).

Shank• 5 years ago

"Large" is a bit of an interesting statement. Companies with $10m in revenue are very common, and are often smaller companies. Software is all about leverage. A very small team can create a lot of leverage with the right tools to make a very strong product and get to $10m ARR without necessarily having many people.

It seems like the real cost to this change is the goodwill from smaller companies + teams that are now realizing they'll have another expense dropped on them. Except the expense is a previously free product with no real improvements, at least from what I can tell.

etxm• 5 years ago

Honest question: Besides IT endpoint management, why does our industry continue to develop software that is leaning more and more towards containerization on Mac OS?

I’ve been a Mac user for 20 years and do a lot of docker and Kubernetes work. I recently started developing on a Linux machine that was a fourth of the price and a lot less burden for my day-to-day work.

0x500x793• 5 years ago

I mean, your "Besides IT endpoint management" comment is the primary reason that most of the jobs that I have worked at won't let me get a linux machine.

princevegeta89• 5 years ago

Is the docker for Mac fixed yet? Last time I checked there were issues with disk mounting which really affected performance

moogly2• 5 years ago

How do you even install Docker Engine on Windows without WSL2? Same goes for macOS.

treesknees2• 5 years ago

If you're referring to Docker Desktop on Windows, you can use the Hyper-V backend instead of WSL2. MacOS uses HyperKit API to spin up a Linux VM to run it. There is no native engine for Windows or MacOS.

https://docs.docker.com/desktop/windows/install/

moogly2• 5 years ago

Sure, but I've never seen a non-Docker Desktop installer for any of the tools like the CLI, Compose etc., and I can't seem to find one now either.

nickjj5• 5 years ago

For everyone who is against this change, can you please write up why?

For a ton of small companies (anyone making $10 million or less per year) nothing is going to change and DD is still free to use.

If you're at a big organization with let's say 200 developers chances are your company makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Even Docker's most expensive business plan would cost you 200 * $21 = $4,200 month.

Payroll for your 200 developers will likely be over 3 million dollars a month. How can you be upset with paying 4k a month? That's almost nothing relative to other expenses.

Realistically I'm surprised Docker is charging so little for their business plan. Making 4k on 200 developers at a 300 million+ company is not asking a lot.

mgarciaisaia• 5 years ago

I'm part of a company that doesn't need to change a thing because of this.

I want to move out of Docker services because of the "The new terms take effect on August 31, 2021" part of the email I've just received, even if it's followed by a "with a grace period until January 31, 2022".

I'm OK with them trying to get money. I'm not OK with them changing things overnight.

kcb3• 5 years ago

Because procurement processes suck and developers don't want to deal with them. When it's something from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, it's not a problem because those deals are handled at a level that developers don't interact much with and are ingrained as business critical. There's no way we're going to have a contract with Docker by January so I fully expect a "Please uninstall Docker Desktop" email long before that.

nickjj5• 5 years ago

What if you asked the person who would write that email to instead ask Docker if they can extend the grace period for you until you can get a contract set up?

Since it's unclear if / how Docker can enforce their TOS I'm guessing they would be happy to extend it because the other avenues lead to you not using DD or using it without paying.

0x500x793• 5 years ago

I don't get enough out of docker desktop for mac to be worth the 21 dollars a month, personally. It manages a VM and the port mappings/exposure of docker sockets on my behalf. That is something that can be replaced fairly easily and not cost me 5-20 dollars a month.

This on top of some of the decisions in the past year like removing the ability to opt out of updates, and the issues that pop up when I don't expect it (crashes, file systems, etc) I am more inclined to find other solutions.

dwaite3• 5 years ago

Because we use containers to share images outside our organization. This reduces the accessibility and thus the value of the entire Docker ecosystem.

darkarmani• 5 years ago

Extortion. They built an entire community of docker users and then this. it's one thing if we all knew they were oracle. It's another thing for them to turn into Oracle after capturing mindshare.

zmmmmm3• 5 years ago

you jumped from $10m revenue to a 200 developer company with payroll of $3m month in your example.

There are tiny companies with $10m revenue (remember, revenue isn't margin and certainly isn't profit). A company could easily have non-employment expenses be 90% of its revenue, so we are talking about $1m or 7-8 person company there on decent salaries. A far cry from the 200 devs you give as an example.

However as to "why" - because docker's precise value proposition is its ubiquity and universality. The exact reason people have adopted it is because everyone can run it, no matter who, no matter where. So this compromises the main value proposition of Docker. People will now find alternatives because if I can't distribute my application using docker and know the person at the other end can run it (because now they need a license that they don't have) then it lost virtually its whole point to me.

nickjj5• 5 years ago

A company could easily have non-employment expenses be 90% of its revenue, so we are talking about $1m or 7-8 person company there on decent salaries

Can you give a few real world examples where a $10 million / year revenue company with 7 employees would have difficulty paying $147 a month (or $49 if they went for the $7 / month instead)? With the $7 / month plan (if you only care about DD), the entire annual cost for all 7 devs is less than hiring 1 developer for 1 day at a normal US dev salary.

PebblesHD• 5 years ago

Similar to siblings, our medium sized enterprise has a procurement process best described as ‘avoid if possible’, with the last product we onboarded taking over 15 months from start to finish for around a $50k annual cost. Our likely move will be away from docker because we can’t afford to be paralysed for that long waiting for bureaucrats to make a decision.

If docker wants to play like this they will need to be willing to partner with a ‘real’ services company who is already on a range of procurement panels to get a foot in the door, at least in my part of the world. If we could pay this as part of our MSA with a vendor we already use, $50k a year wouldn’t be so bad, but adding a new vendor and pushing that uphill? Not likely for us.

lanevorockz• 5 years ago

RIP

sgt• 5 years ago

"or higher than $10m in annual revenue" .. that isn't necessary a large company. And it says nothing of profit.

paxys• 5 years ago

Their product and pricing page is extremely vague and full of dark patters, and doesn't really describe what "Docker Desktop" even is. Can I use the CLI without downloading Docker Desktop? Can I launch the daemon and interact with it via the API?

antonyh3• 5 years ago

I see this as an opportunity to play with Podman. I don't fall into the category where I'll need to pay, but Docker Desktop has long been somewhat user-hostile.

The forced updates I HATE. It's my machine, I get to pick the version of software it runs. And I've had enough bad updates from Docker to get jittery when it pushes one on me.

zenlf• 5 years ago

On the one hand, I'm sad that I probably have to uninstall docker desktop because I only use it for small side projects, on the other I understand Docker Inc's need to monetize as a for profit company.

I do have a genuine question though. Can a company just change their pricing structure and make it effective immediately(I understand they have a grace period here)? I guess for free tiers they probably can, because the users have never paid them, but what if I'm a paying customer? Could Docker simply say sorry we have changed our pricing from next billing cycle(or tomorrow) you have to pay 100% more. Could they legally do something like that?

zmmmmm3• 5 years ago

Interestingly, I think this may be a boon for kubernetes.

We've been managing all our infrastructure with docker / compose, and its been great. But one of the key advantages is unifying the dev & prod environments. Now lately we've been outgrowing the docker solution so k8 is on the radar, but one of the things holding me back is losing the unified prod/dev experience.

So the question has been, take the hit and suck up all the bugs, confusion, duplication etc. that come from having these separate, or move everyone over to k8 and have to deal with the complexity on the developer side?

Well, this decision now definitely tips the scales - there's a distinct advantage to going all in on k8s because we can run it up and down the stack and not be constantly hassled by licensing and software restrictions.

mleonhard3• 5 years ago

There's a standards conversion going on where we can trace the provenance of each and every layer of the image, we can start signing those layers, and with that metadata, we can start doing automated decisioning, automated reporting, automated visibility into what's been done to that image at each step of the lifecycle.

Docker's CEO is being disingenuous. When you deploy a Docker container, you specify the image ID. The ID looks like a SHA-256 digest and even starts with the string 'sha256' but it is an arbitrary value generated by the docker daemon on the local machine. The ID is not a hash of the image contents [0, 1]. In other words, docker images are not content-addressed.

Since docker images are not content-addressed, your image registry and image transfer tools can subvert the security of your production systems. The fix is straightforward: make an image ID be the SHA-256 digest of the image contents, which is the same everywhere: on your build system, image registry, test system, and production hosts. This fix will increase supply chain security for all Docker users. It is massive low-hanging fruit.

Now Docker will add image signatures without first making images content-addressed. Their decision makes sense only if their goal is to make money and not make a secure product. I cannot trust a company with such priorities.

[0] https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/39247#issuecomment-49697...

[1] https://github.com/distribution/distribution/issues/1662

EDIT: Added another link.

bspammer• 5 years ago

The fact that images are not content-addressed is very surprising to me. I just always assumed they were because… why wouldn’t they be? I bet a large proportion of other devs assumed the same.

voxic112• 5 years ago

They are if you use the digest rather than the id.

hda11110• 5 years ago

Podman project recently introduced a lot of content addressing features. Some are still experimental though.

cpuguy834• 5 years ago

That's because the parent comment is completely wrong.

Images have a reference (e.g. "ubuntu:20.04"), they have an ID inside docker (random string), and they have a digest.

All image data is stored by digest. Even when you fetch an image reference it is looking up the digest of that reference and fetching that digest and that digest is verified.

An image manifest contains the digests of the image config and the digest of all the layers, the image config also stores the digest of all the layers. This is how all the data is traversed from the registry.

voxic112• 5 years ago

You seem to be mixing up image ids which are not content addressable identifiers and image digests which are.

mleonhard3• 5 years ago

Image IDs are not content addressable identifiers and I need them to be. How is that a mixup?

ericpp• 5 years ago

A better strategy to me would've been to keep it free and tightly integrate it with Docker Hub to push people towards Docker Hub services. This software is already installed on most Windows computers that need to use Docker and provides a perfect opportunity to promote Docker Hub and any of their other services.

flemhans• 5 years ago

Received an unsolicited mail from them outlining the new terms, with no way to unsubscribe.

znpy• 5 years ago

I've been blandly pushing for podman at work.

Maybe this time management will start listening.

Plus, frankly, podman works reliably well in rootless mode, no more messing up with docker in docker, you can be root in you container without needing pretty much any privileged resources.

And since podman 3.x you can use docker-compose just pointing it to the user rootless podman socket.

And podman can start act like a dumb kubernetes and start pods and deployment from the yaml definitions.

xiaodai• 5 years ago

right move

dboreham• 5 years ago

Countdown started until Microsoft adds their own docker to Windows.

mikeflynn• 5 years ago

My team and I use Docker Desktop and I don't think anyone signs in. We just use it to install the docker cli tools on the Mac.

We're a small dev team, but it seems like nothing is changing at all for those of us who don't sign in to Docker.

ibly312• 5 years ago

It's free anyway if you sign in and your company is less than 250 employees and less than $10mil in revenue

jordemort• 5 years ago

Well, that's one way to drive Podman adoption.

smackeyacky• 5 years ago

I can see Microsoft or Amazon stepping into this space. If GitHub desktop is anything to go by, getting [MS][AWS]Container Desktop as a replacement for Docker desktop would be a no brainer. 90% of what Docker Desktop does is already available in VSCode in some form, just the janky GUI is missing.

Somebody else already did the hard work to get it going with WSL2, why not just cut out the 3rd party you don't need and put it together so the command lines were compatible and your existing tooling works. AWS and Microsoft both have skin in this game and Docker Desktop would be right in their sights.

On something like Debian, you don't even get a desktop gui and you don't miss it either. No reason why WSL2 or a mac shouldn't be exactly the same.

jcoder2• 5 years ago

Reading this I was thinking I would wake up tomorrow and go back to using `docker-machine` and a separate VM for development on my work mac. Interesting timing that they started the work to deprecate/remove `docker-machine` three weeks ago: https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/245

jillesvangurp• 5 years ago

You can use a remote docker host pretty easily. I've been playing with qemu on my mac since I read the announcement regarding docker for mac no longer being free (as in beer). I have port 5555 forwarded to 22 on the qemu vm so I can ssh into it. You can use whatever you want for virtual machines of course. Qemu seems nice these days but requires a bit of fiddling to get working. Virtualbox or vmware are probably easier. And this works just as well with cloud based virtual machines or any kind of remote host.

Assuming you have docker and ssh running on your remote host:

  # point docker on your mac to your remote machine
  export DOCKER_HOST=ssh://dude@localhost:5555
  # run nginx or whatever you want
  docker run -p 8080:80 nginx
  # forward the port locally
  ssh -L 8080:localhost:8080 -p 5555 jilles@localhost
  # open http://localhost:8080 in your browser

There are all sorts of things you can do beyond this to make this more seamless but this is pretty sweet already.

isatty• 5 years ago

I think that the functionality provided by Docker needs to be a first class citizen in Linux, cli and user interface including and not just the backend. I don't like having my workflows tied to a private companies whims. Podman is a viable alternative, and while its tied to redhat, it's still better than Docker imho.

mohanmcgeek• 5 years ago

Systemd has something called "systemd-nspawn" back when Docker was at its peak.

Not sure if its still around.

dgellow2• 5 years ago

That’s surprisingly cheap

dedoussis• 5 years ago

What stops any developer of a large org using Docker Desktop through their personal license/account? How is such a restriction going to be imposed?

WhyNotHugo• 5 years ago

Kind of annoying that Docker Hub and Docker Desktop are both sold in one package.

As someone who uses Docker Hub (the public repos) but not Docker Desktop (their Windows/Mac proprietary apps), it pisses me to have to pay for crap software I don't use nor care about.

Then again, the ecosystem did end up being built to be centralised around on single repository, so we did all kinda buy into this.

acro5piano• 5 years ago

Just use Linux desktop

habosa• 5 years ago

Tech companies should not be able to offer something for free and then later charge for it. It should be illegal and prosecuted as anticompetitive behavior. It's not at all fair to potential competition, who can't beat free and therefore don't enter the marketplace. It's just a way to try and capture a whole market unfairly. Then when the price goes up you can end up with regretful consumers who may have chosen another option if not for the misleading pricing.

If they want to do this, it should have to say in big bold font "this is free for now and we will charge for it later, you will have X months of warning before being required to pay at that time".

In some non-software industries this is already considered illegal behavior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

I'd personally even go so far as to say that there should be some legislation around using very cheap loss-inducing prices for extended periods of time to capture the market and then jacking them back up. Like how Ubers used to cost ~30% of what they do now in San Francisco. But that's a lot harder to specify as there are legitimate use cases for sales and loss leaders.

seanhunter• 5 years ago

I don't really see Docker having that much of an alternative - they have to figure out some way to make money and none of their other attempts have worked.

That being said, since the core docker tech is free, this will surely just cause some free alternative to DD to spring up in the relatively short term, and accelerate the move away from Docker in general, which has been happening for a while.

GordonS3• 5 years ago

Anyone here running the Docker Engine in WSL2?

I've been using Docker Desktop for years, and thankfully it's been more stable for the past year or two - before that it was a shitshow.

It works great for me now, but I don't actually need or use any of the GUI features - it's more or less a glorified installer for Docker Engine. Not sure if it has to do any magic for mounting Windows folders to work?

Anyway, curious if it's possible to just run Docker Engine in WSL2 myself, if there are any gotchas, and if mounting Windows folders "just works"?

fennecfoxy• 5 years ago

God forbid a company charge money for software they make. I don't understand why people are so angry considering they're still allowing free use outside of businesses.

jay_at_adnx• 5 years ago

There's a lot of fair points here. We (big company not fitting in the personal/free tier of the subscription) were using docker desktop (on windows 10) to build windows (server) targeted images. From the various comments, it seems like it's really not a common use case. The question I have is : how does one is supposed to proceed with this specific use case if the subscription is not considered for various reasons ? Switch the dev environment to windows server ? Drop the windows container ball and switch to Linux based one ? Are we the only company doing this kind of stunt ? (and feeling a kind of vendor-lock-in vibes right now ?)

HeavyStorm• 5 years ago

Company has half a million employees. Most are developers. Many use Docker daily.

No way the company is fronting these costs.

Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

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