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Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

> I never see Azure Stack mentioned so maybe Microsoft will look into a Docker acquisition to boost their enterprise footprint.

The companies using Azure Stack today are some of the least likely to be parroting that fact. Microsoft's on-prem is pretty well entrenched, particularly in "boring enterprise" where pragmatism beats idealism, are quiet "do the work, don't leak the work" more than proudly proclaim to be chasing the trends.

That said, Azure Stack (and Azure) already have strong Docker support, without an acquisition to date.

More interestingly, in my opinion, though, is that right now Azure Functions is the only "serverless" runtime with a strong open source story, and equally strong on-prem (both as part of Azure Stack and, increasingly from what I hear, standalone) as well as Cloud support.

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I'd be surprised if Azure Stack sees big adoption any time soon; they aren't just letting you run some Azure services on existing hardware... the way they're doing it is to really take the "cloud in my datacenter" concept to the extreme:

* Subscription pricing like a cloud service, even though it's on-premise.

* Only runs on certified hardware appliances... You're looking at an investment of at least $300,000 for a base configuration.

So, OK, I get it, you're getting a private cloud and you're not supposed to worry about hardware anymore, but it's probably too big a mental shift for most traditional enterprises. And people with that kind of budget are already locked into a VMWare infrastructure for the next couple of years.

> That said, Azure Stack (and Azure) already have strong Docker support, without an acquisition to date.

Maybe I'm confused about what you mean by "Azure Stack", but there was most certainly an acquisition[1] related to Azure's docker support, the Deis team (now part of Azure team) were some of the earliest contributors to the Helm project, and this buyout was widely hailed from what I can remember as Microsoft's first big investment in Kubernetes.

Many of those people remained with the Azure team, and none of them work on Deis today. So, instead, they are driving the development of tools like Draft, AKS, OSBA, and Virtual Kubelet.

And of course MS also made a high-profile acquisition of GitHub, just not sure that one is relevant to Azure Stack.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/10/microsoft-acquires-contain...

It was in reference to an acquisition of Docker, Inc. itself. They've worked quite closely with Docker, Inc. but (so far?) haven't acquired them.

But correct, there have been related acquisitions.

Interesting, I would say that it's fortunate nobody can buy Kubernetes (because it only is composed of acceptance and compliance with a conformance suite, there are dozens of separate implementations and they may all be Kubernetes.)

To be honest that's a great feature and one reason why I am not terribly scared about consequences of any news about a RedHat acquisition; that being so even though I do follow OpenShift with some interest.

I'm sure that Docker is also a target for acquisitions by these bigger companies but while we're on the subject thanks to Kubernetes and the CRI, it's pretty darn unlikely that anyone is ever going to totally corner the market on Linux containers, at least any time in the foreseeable future.

Regarding the claimed market presence of Azure Stack can you explain why it's not in the recent Forrester report?

https://reprints.forrester.com/#/assets/2/431/RES141562/repo...

Fascinating. The choices made in the criteria in that report are alluded to but not explicit, so of course we must resort to mindreading. My best guess is because Azure Stack is more than just a "container platform", and the "container platform" for Azure Stack essentially is "just" Docker, so Azure Stack usage in this case would be rolled up in the strong position you see for Docker here.

It would be great to see Forrester more forthright on such methodology, however, and this may be a good reminder that Forrester here is not a transparent, peer reviewed journal and doesn't have to show their homework.

Docker, as mentioned in the Forrester report is "Docker Enterprise 2.0" and as the text mentions it's a Kubernetes platform with Swarm and Kubernetes orchestrators.

AzureStack presumably runs AKS, the same as the Kubernetes service that runs in Azure, which is totally different.

The market size can't be attributed in any way to Azure Stack which is why I was surprised you mentioned it was heavily used. Gartner talks to a wide range of companies usually.

From the report:

> "We did not evaluate native public cloud container or Kubernetes services."

In which case AKS doesn't show up because the report intentionally excluded it.

Again, I don't understand anything about the methodology of this report, it's very clear it's designed to present some bias, but there isn't enough transparency on what/why/where, and every time I skim it I come up with other questions as to the validity of this report towards any market size determinations whatsoever.

That just means they excluded Google GKE, Microsoft AKS, Amazon EKS etc.. all of the public clouds.

I have another comparison sheet for those if anyone is interested.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1U0x4-NQegEPGM7eVTKJe...

The report is from Forrester. I hardly ever read them but Docker has it posted all over its website so I was curious.

Forrester and Gartner seem too high profile to be biased. This one isn't sponsored so the researchers will have had free reign over what was added. If Azure Stack is really in use by many companies I'd be surprised if they missed it.

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