I thought one of those most important enterprisy things would usually be a long support timeframe. One year isn't exactly very LTS.
- Keep in mind we are releasing Docker EE quarterly, and supporting every release for a year. This is attractive for enterprises who are adopting Docker in part to make their software practice more agile. They don't want to be forced to upgrade every 3 months. But they appreciate that they can. This works for Docker because it sits relatively higher on the stack. If we were providing a storage appliance, or a traditional host operating system, this wouldn't make sense
- For a company of our size and maturity (300 people, 4 year-old free product, 18 months-old paid product), earning the trust of large conservative enterprises can be hard. We do it by being honest about our abilities, conservative in what we promise, and going above and beyond to deliver on what we promised. In this case, we simply weren't confident that we could promise more than 4 simultaneous EE releases (1 year support x 4 releases per year). That might cost us sales opportunities now with more conservative buyers, but those buyers would probably have been unhappy with us anyway. We can get them later - when our product is more mature and our release and support infrastructure is more robust.
EDIT: I see other commentors confidently stating what is and isn't enterprise-ready. Remember that enterprises are, by definition, very large. There are many departments with different goals and different priorities. For some of them, Docker EE with quarterly releases and 1-year support is a good fit. For other, it's not. And that's OK.
Enterprises want LTSes because legacy platforms are a nightmare to install, operate and upgrade. It becomes less important as the platform itself becomes less bestial.
Ultimately, enterprises want outcomes. Any given checklist item from the buying department usually represents scar tissue that may or may not still be relevant. New platforms -- Cloud Foundry, OpenShift v3, Docker EE, whichever of the thousand blooming Kubernetes offerings will succeed -- are in a position to renegotiate from first principles.
You might want to look into BOSH. It's a large part of the operability secret sauce for Cloud Foundry.
Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we're ostensibly competitors due to the increasing overlap between Docker EE and Cloud Foundry.
Docker still is a new product, evolving very fast (this announcement is just one more proof of that). Is it production ready ? Yes If you want to move fast and benefit from new tech and are ready to upgrade regularly. No if you are not able to perform those upgrades and need insurance that the project will contribute significant ressources to fixing issues on 3 years old versions.
And currently I totally understand that the Docker team sets slider more towards "new dev" than towards "support". That will probably change in the future.
And that's a large part of the problem. We, as an Enterprise, don't want something with rapid evolving infrastructure, features. We need stability, critical and security patches. Emphasis on stability. 3 years is a minimum we would consider for that and not a 1 year only support range.
EDIT: I did not realize it was per node pricing. I take back mostly everything I said below. I hope that ultimately when Docker does provide 3 years of support, you'll be willing to pay up.
Look at the pricing, even the biggest Enterprise plan is $2000/yr. This is aimed at small consultancies, startups and small businesses, etc that are tired of sending their developers into the docker github issues to log bugs and argue features.
When Docker adds a plan that satisfies your Enterprise, you'll be paying typical Enterprise prices that will be at least an order of magnitude larger than the current biggest plan. Hopefully you are able to put your money where your mouth is.
- https://www.docker.com/customers/docker-datacenter-delivers-...
- https://www.docker.com/customers/ge-uses-docker-enable-self-...
- https://www.docker.com/customers/ing-delivers-value-customer...
There are many more here: https://www.docker.com/customers
Also, as others have noted: the price point is per-node. Docker EE is most definitely for enterprises.
Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, etc.
That's exactly why you do not need/want docker now. Several years ago Hypervisors like XEN were all the rage. Enterprise could not rely on it, because of the lack of LTS, while smaller startups and businesses were building their infrastructure around it. Everyone is now using those technologies which have undergone years of testing and have massive support from vendors. Docker will reach that stage in the future, but right now it's just too soon. You are asking the Docker team to slow down the development of the technology for everyone because you don't want to deal with the consequences of using a developing product. Let docker reach it's full potential, let the community do the testing, then ask for LTS on a mature technology. At that point, there will be probably be a new trend somewhere that will bring startups to the next level while your get to benefit from containerisation with full vendor support.
Then the AWS/Google/DO/other worked hard on the hypervisor and they released infra that worked and is entreprisey ready... but it's a complete offering, you cannot just get their Xen package and put it on your systems (assuming it's even powered by Xen anymore), you have to use their platforms.
Docker is unstable now.
AWS/Google/RedHat/CoreOS are all working pretty hard to pull out an offering for containers that works and is entreprisey ready. It's gonna take years to be production ready enough for critical systems, and it's as likely to reuse Docker as to replace it with their own more stable tech.
The point is, docker is nowhere near ready in its current state. Wait and see.
The commercial distributions (by Pivotal, IBM, SAP most notably) are licensed to gigabuck corporations worldwide.
That said, other companies and opensource projects will absolutely move towards the value line. There's no money or glory in building blocks.
Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, the major contributor of engineering to Cloud Foundry.
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... and NodeJS learned that if you want to be a proper production environment, you still need to have LTS. 'Being fashionable' isn't enough.
> And currently I totally understand that the Docker team sets slider more towards "new dev" than towards "support".
Flashy features built on an unstable base is not something you want to stake a company on - support is important, it's just not sexy. New features gets you new users. Support makes them stay... and even pay.
It's happened at least 5 times in the past 2 years, that's VERY frequent from an enterprise viewpoint.
Backwards compat and LTS already comes up a lot with enterprise support, requiring an annual upgrade project will only complicate it