I don’t think this is reasonable criticism. It’s more than fair for them to charge for egress traffic, and they’re doing it at a price point less than AWS.

Of course it would be nicer if things were free, but to claim this to be evidence of a march into irrelevance? For charging for egress traffic on a Docker registry? That’s a bit too much don’t you think? Especially considering how easy it is to set up some GitHub action and or another CI tool that constantly keeps hammering their registries without a lot of value. Docker (the company) clearly feels the pain of this a lot, and they just want to prevent this type of thing from happening.

If I were to guess the intended use case is to help you with deployments inside the DO cloud, and to actually reduce your ingress traffic when pulling from other, remote docker registries. It’s a win/win for these use cases, and to be honest, it’s not expensive.

Besides, DO’s pricing still is very much favorable compared to other cloud vendors.