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Comment by IMTDb | Hacker News Reader

Docker initial release was just 4 years ago, your asking for a support timeframe that's around the same length as the age of the project itself.

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.

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> Docker still is a new product, evolving very fast

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.

You just listed a bunch of reasons why your Enterprise should not be using Docker.

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.

Note that the pricing is per node.

For reference here are a few case studies of enterprises using Docker EE in production:

- 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.

Of interest, GE is a Cloud Foundry Foundation member and a founding investor in Pivotal. They have a fairly engineering org working on their IoT-oriented version, Predix.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, etc.

> "We, as an Enterprise, don't want something with rapid evolving infrastructure, features"

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.

Years ago, the hypervisor was nailed by VmWare, while Xen was a joke.

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.

IIRC it's pretty likely that AWS runs on Xen, or at least did so at some point in the past. There was some striking correlation between Xen security advisories and mass reboots of AWS nodes.

AFAIK AWS runs patched Xen. They seem to have built quite a bit on top though, and e.g. Have re-written lots of the network stack. This also seems to be why their networking stuff would break or be very flaky regularly as of a few years ago.

I'd argue, with the benefit of infinite bias, that an enterprise offering for containers already exists: Cloud Foundry. Running in production for years.

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.

Red Hat OpenShift / Atomic might be a good match then.

NodeJS still is a new product, evolving very fast. Is it production ready ? Yes If you want to move fast and benefit from new tech and are ready to upgrade regularly.

...

... 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.

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