I'm not sure if there's a better way to monetize the Docker Hub, but this seems so hostile to adoption.
Sounds like an entirely reasonable thing to start imagining.
Reliability, safety, determinism and predictability are not thrust upon someone from the commons.
I frankly find it someone atrocious and abusive that downstream systems do not adequately cache these assets. The main archive repositories should be the source of truth, but they also don't need to be the fountain.
It's so unbelievably user hostile that it seems like the result will be people just stop using Docker. The right solution for Docker is probably to spin off or monetize the Hub in a different way.
Imagine if GitHub started charging users for git cloning too many packfiles per hour.
Or you can monetize something else that's correlated to those costs to subsidize the main use case and keep new user acquisition frictionless. Like NPM charging large businesses with special needs with NPM Enterprise, or GitHub with teams and CI/CD features and GitHub Enterprise, and so on.
Docker sold off Docker Enterprise. Now they're trying to extract rents from people who are just trying to "docker build", a command whose ease of use is what drove people to use Docker in the first place.
Foot, meet gun.
Docker is breaking their main selling point. "docker build" and "docker run" should _just work_. By breaking that expectation in subtle ways they risk alienating users. By advertising that they're willing to break their main use case, they're going to alienate businesses and early adopter developers like myself.
Now I'm looking for alternative registries and making sure that devops code I manage doesn't depend on Docker. That's surely not what they wanted, right?
>We’ve been getting questions from customers and the community regarding container image layers. We are not counting image layers as part of the pull rate limits. Because we are limiting on manifest requests,
> For example, roughly 30% of all downloads on Hub come from only 1% of our anonymous users.
The limits appear to be 100 pulls per 6 hour time frame per ip address for anon users and twice as much for authenticated users. The least favorable reading of this is to assume a rolling period so lets roll with that. Pun intended.
According to docker whom I imagine is in a better position to evaluate the situation this will impact almost no users. Logically properly caching downloads seems like it would improve local performance. Do you really need, given the possibility to cache downloads, to pull a new image every 1.8 minutes in environments where paying $5 a month for individuals or $25 a month for a team would be prohibitive?
I'm going to assume that orgs manage a variety of one off and recurring expenses. I don't see how this is any different.
What I think is the most salient point is that docker is not a new endeavor. They already have many users. Acquiring new people who consume resources and pay nothing isn't a valuable proposition for them. Why would it be? Do you wish you had more roommates living with you eating your food and paying nothing towards the rent?
Given that even a "docker build" does a manifest pull, it's not just "new images", but existing ones as well.
Now expand that to a team that say, builds 10 images in parallel using Docker Compose. Now it's a build every ~18 minutes will hit the limit. Larger builds, like say a CI system building every time there's a push to a branch? Yikes.
I've expressed my thoughts in detail here about why I think they should find another avenue to monetize Docker: https://twitter.com/AaronFriel/status/1297988737981247488
No developer starting out is going to hit 200 images in 6 hours, and even if the did, they would go "heh" and then either take a break or pony up the 5$.
5$! It's way too little money for those limits, there should be brackets all the way up to 5000$ per month. Same for Rubygems and NPM. It's ridiculous that those are struggling organizations that can barely afford to have professionals work on them, when they're absolutely essential to whole industries.
I wish they would force us to pay them.