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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

You're missing the point of the author. It's not so much that Docker as a technology is bad; there's nothing wrong with it. The point is that Docker, the company, cannot monetize upon the technology, because the moment they start charging for their containerization technology, people will switch to an alternative container technology, especially now that Kubernetes has won the orchestration "wars" and made it so easy to switch the underlying technology.

Personally, I have to agree with the author and think it's difficult to see a bright future for the company that lives up to its $1.3B valuation.

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Docker Inc is fine. It would be silly to charge for the actual containerization because that's not really the value of their platform.

Things Docker can/does charge for and could do very well with.

- Support: Businesses are happy to pay maintenance contracts for fixed LTS versions of Docker which is their EE product.

- Kube: Docker has pivoted their UCP product into a turnkey on-prem Kubernetes distribution. Plenty of room in that space to grow.

- Registry; You wouldn't run random images from DockerHub in production, right? Similar to Red Hat's product in this space there's a lot of money to be made in having officially supported images. Images with a pedigree, aduit trail, CVE reporting, yada yada. Partner with Canonical and since it's way easier to do this when you already have distro maintainers and you have a solid RH competitor that devs will like more.

- Security: Audit your images that have been sitting around and not updated in ages.

- Hosting: They'll be one of many but there's plenty of space in providing some ergonomics compared to Google/AWS's offerings.

That's not a billion dollars company though.

Seems like it's more valuable and ubiquitous than mongo db, and their valuations exceed 1.5B

Ubiquitous does not equal value. Docker doesn’t do anything you can’t do with lxc tooling and an object store (registry). That’s the benefit: containers are free, the orchestration is free, and the registry tooling is free and easily replicated.

Mongo equally so (JSON in PostgreSQL). These valuations are fantasy.

Building a scalable service on top of that is not free, nor easy :)

You're spending those scaling dollars regardless (developers with devops knowledge, infrastructure/SRE folks). Better to spend it on competent staff than a company lighting VC money on fire, no?

i think it's a bit more complicated than that. very skilled developers that know this tech won't jump ship to many borderline broke startups which could easily just get started with docker with less than 'rockstar' devs

> Better to spend it on competent staff than a company lighting VC money on fire, no?

False dichotomy though. You either acknowledge that getting a vendor to do that for you also implies competent staff or you acknowledge that hiring "competent staff" is not like flipping a switch and requires training, ramp-up time, few wrong hires, getting managers to guide the teams, etc

I'm not sure which way is better, but I don't think the industry has decided either :)

It's already a billion dollar company.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/docker-has-raised-92-milli...

That's the point of parent and the article: It has a billion dollar valuation, but they doubt it can back that up with actual revenue and profits.

Of course not, a product company like docker is built for acquisition.

I can think of a few companies that might want to buy Docker. I can think of no company that would buy it at a billion dollar valuation.

I can think of a few companies that may pay an absurd vaulation for Docker; IBM and Microsoft.

Microsoft's containerization strategy heavily depends on Docker (they've got a licensing deal so that Windows server can use Docker EE for free) they might well pay good money to by Docker

Didn't IBM just buy Red Hat for $34 Billion? Can you imagine a future where Amazon acquires Docker to optimize it to run on AWS and perhaps perform a bit worse on GCP. Any small advantage you could get in the space would equate to large changes with as ubiquitous Docker is and as large as AWS is.

Perhaps but given AWS is a heavy Xen and KVM shop something like Kata Containers might suit them better.

Dockerhub doesn’t even support MFA, not to mention their IAM is all or nothing (there’s only 2 roles). I don’t think they’re focusing on the things that they should be.

Well, if you're focused on MFA and elaborate IAM for Dockerhub as "big problems", then I don’t think you're focusing on the things that you should be.

Those are more like enterprise checklist items than real needs...

Yes. As a response to a comment talking about enterprise support contracts as a main source of revenue for Docker, I think enterprise checklist items are entirely valid items to focus on.

I guess if the focus is "enterprise support contracts", that's legit.

Well this is the inherent push-pull of the industry, isn't it? The ones with money generally have insane compliance requirements (because they have money, they have more risk); the places without money care more about getting things done (since they're trying to make money...).

If it weren't so, we'd all just sell our hot new WhateverAsAService to banks straight away, right?

Fun fact: if you use Red Hat, you have to use Docker EE. You don't even have the option of getting CE and taking responsibility for Docker support yourself.

Could you explain that a bit more?

That isn't true. You can also use podman, and cri-o in the case of Kubernetes.

> if you use Red Hat...

"Red Hat" as in RHEL specifically, or are you meaning any of the family (eg CentOS)?

Asking because I've not hit any problems using Docker CE with CentOS 7. Well, aside from general bugs (etc). But nothing seems to force the use of EE instead of CE.

Docker CE is officially supported (well, it's not supported because its CE, but it's packaged, repos, install guide) etc. but only EE is packaged for RHEL. RedHat also has their own docker package like many other distros, so you can still get it free easily, but you have to get it through them and wait on them for updates.

If you're using RHEL why wouldn't you default to using Red Hat's build of Docker? I definitely prefer it to the official builds. Red Hat in general seems very annoyed at Docker and carries quite a few QoL patches like being able to add registries to search.

Also: container orchestration if _far_ from solved problem. Kubernetes is a nice try, but it screams for a better layer above it that would allow devs to deploy services _easily_.

There is plenty of ways Docker Inc. can create and capture value in this space. Their unique value is that whatever product they make, the world will check it out... They "just" need to make it good and figure out the business behind it.

Understood, and I'm fairly certain that a large corporation that uses and markets Docker extensively will look to acquire it sometime in the future. Docker's ubiquity is exactly what makes it valuable.

Could be any of the FAANG companies but I posit Microsoft since they noticeably try to make Docker on Windows a seamless experience and also push Docker within their cloud offerings to modernize legacy apps towards Azure. They've already purchased a large community-oriented company (GitHub) and have acquired companies at a surprisingly high price (LinkedIn).

And considering most all docker containers are based on and continuously updated from a GitHub repo, a docker acquisition makes a lot of sense. Gitlab already has its own container registry.

> The point is that Docker, the company, cannot monetize upon the technology, because the moment they start charging for their containerization technology, people will switch to an alternative container technology...

I see the thought process but disagree with the premise that they need to charge for their container technology directly.

For example, GitHub does not charge for git, but instead for the convenient layers that they add on top of it.

Another example is that Google does not charge for Kubernetes but you can buy support which every enterprise company wants and since GKE happens to be the most convenient way to get a K8s cluster rolling in the cloud (for most circumstances) and also now on a box now with GKE On-Prem, many will choose that path so Google still gets their money, just from product / services / support on top of the free core.

They can also monetize the "fallout paths" — turns out you're in over your head running all of that K8s stuff yourself? Come pay us more and use our K8s PaaS instead! Not sure if they actually have one yet, but consider something like GKE Serverless here.

Enterprise features and support around running containers in production are worth a lot of money.

Docker can continue charging for all of its porcelain layers on top like Docker Hub and Docker Enterprise and make plenty of money off of big fish.

They could also monetize by being acquired by Microsoft, Google, or Amazon.

1. GitHub was struggling badly. They had lay-offs, etc.

2. Google still makes the lion's share of it's money from search/ads. Google Compute is struggling and being subsidized by search/ads.

IMHO, Docker's only exit strategy is to sell. They don't have enough time left to grow an organic business. Silicon Valley money always wants paid back, sooner rather than later.

The layoffs and new CFO at Docker, IMHO, are all about cleaning up the finances so that a sale is possible at a good price.

Their last round of investment barely averted a down round. The value bump was minimal and the investors are mostly from a bank in Brazil that likely doesn't understand exactly what they bought into (a lot of uneducated money out there right now because there is no place to put it). None of the original investors participated which shows they don't believe in the company anymore.

Their most valuable asset is Windows support. Hence, the most likely aquirerer would be Microsoft. I'll bet a paycheck they sell for somewhere between 1.5B and 2.5B. Keep this thread for posterity :-)

It's painfully obvious to anybody that has been in this game for a while...

(opinions and analysis my own)

1 - Having too many people is more an indicator that they hired too fast or more than they could sustainably afford rather than indicating anything about their inherent monetization strategy and approach. Every company has a ceiling somewhere, even if it's getting acquired by Microsoft for $7.5B. That's a pretty nice ceiling to have.

2 - That seems fine and besides the point... Google is massive. Google Cloud (excluding the half that comes from G Suite) brings in $2B per year in revenue. That might only be a few percent of Google's overall, but a few percent of $80B is still a massive number.

There are actually a lot of issues with Docker around breakage and stability. That's alluded to in the article.

Docker itself is in trouble because they got the wrong use case from the start. They completely missed out about orchestration.

Containerization requires to both have containers (docker images) and deploy them on fleet of servers (kubernetes orchestration). The later is where the value is.

> Docker itself is in trouble because they got the wrong use case from the start. They completely missed out about orchestration.

That's actually how they started -- they were a PaaS called dotCloud before they were Docker!

This was before the term "orchestration" became common, but the point was that they were running apps in multiple languages. They were like Heroku except they supported more than one language (back when Heroku was basically Rails apps).

They didn't get much traction and had to pivot to Docker. I think the underlying reason is that writing a PaaS / distributed OS like Kubernetes is extremely difficult, and they were spread too thin. They didn't really nail a single use case like Heroku nailed Rails apps. They were trying to run everything and ended up running nothing.

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This "rhyming" of history makes me smile, and makes me think how important timing is. dotCloud was the right product, done too early and done poorly. Docker was arugably the wrong product at the right time! I say "wrong" because I never thought it was a sustainable product or business, but it did come about at a time when people really needed a quick and dirty solution.

And now the surrounding ecosystem has changed drastically and I agree with the OP that Docker may be left out of it.

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Another thing I find funny is that App Engine was already "serverless" 10+ years ago... you wrote Python apps and uploaded them as .zip files (web or batch processing). You didn't manage virtual machines. So somehow they were also a bit early, and maybe the product was lacking in some ways as a result.

Agreed.

I'm not sure that dotcloud and App Engine though were the right products though.

They have shown that a fully managed cloud solution is not the answer. Barely no company could use it, let alone migrate existing software to a whole new platform. It's limited to a very small niche.

Docker and Kubernetes are standalone products. Companies can use them internally and make it work with what they already have.

Amazon did it first with elastic apps, uploading a plain WAR file, and letting it run somehow, with transparent mySQL connections.

I read the finer point of the argument to be that Docker got the layer of abstraction wrong for monetization. That Kubernetes (which orchestrates containers) is the tool at the layer of abstraction where a company could provide a product that has enterprise demand similar to Red Hat. And that Docker is a replaceable piece of technology in the market of managing cloud architecture.

Would a $32B valuation of Red Hat make you reconsider?

That's a good point, there's huge market demand for technology and talent in the cloud native space.

However I don't see how Docker Inc can be substainable in the long run.

What's most likely to happen is Docker being acqui-hired by someone like Microsoft.

The story of Docker, Inc should be read as a cautionary tale to those who think that every random bit of open source should be “monetized” by seeking rent for its continued use and support.

Or that open source isn’t always a good idea, at least from the point of view of certain parties.

Exactly, when will Silicon valley investors understand that Open Source:

1. Doesn't grow revenue at the speeds they want returns 2. Isn't "free marketing" (dear God I have seen this one too many times, CTOs even write it out in blogs sometimes) 3. Only really makes sense when you get out more than you put in, aka is community drive . Community driven open source is really the only profitable open source.

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