Because they received an insane valuation years ago and probably aren't even worth break-even on their funding rounds. Google already has far more K8s knowledge internally than anyone at docker, so what would be their gain?
MS did try to buy them back in 2016 but Docker pulled an Jerry* Yang and said no [1]. I don't see why MS would bother at this point, they are also headed down the k8s path, and anything they needed from an expertise perspective they likely already received through their partnership agreement [2].
[1] https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/sources-microsoft-t...
[2] https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-microsoft-partnership/
*I incorrectly said Andrew Yang initially, my apologies for my bad memory and any confusion it may have caused. Thank you Hexcles for the correction.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/yahoo-rejects-microsofts-bid/
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/07/25/yahoo-s...
*I incorrectly said Andrew Yang initially, my apologies for my bad memory and any confusion it may have caused. Thank you Hexcles for the correction.
As a founder post Series B you probably have at least 10% of the business, that's a nice $400MM payout coming your way.
But if the VC invested at a $1B price, picks up 10% and 80% of their return goes to their LPs they are personally pocketing much less.
So it is advantageous for them to continue to shoot for the stars rather than sell short. Plus they have multiple bets going on at the same time while the founders only have one.
So a $4B acquisition nets the founder $400MM, but and the VC firm is picking up $300MM of which 80% is going back to LPs, leaving $60MM for the partnership, perhaps split 3-7 ways, with maybe a kicker for the partner that sourced and led the investment.
So let's say that's roughly $10MM going to the VC partner.
Well you got one person staring at $400MM and another staring at $10MM.
The interests aren't quite aligned.
Also survivorship bias has us focused on companies that turned down acquisition offers and made it big, like Facebook, Google, Netflix, Snapchat, and so forth, but we don't really hear about the companies that turn down the offer and then fail to meet that acquisition price later, because that story just doesn't sell as well and the company fades into irrelevance so it isn't a piece that is picked up often.
Certainly at the time it could have been a good decision given how new the market was and the potential upside, but obviously hindsight is 20/20.
1. Offer open-source 100% free product that's absolutely ground breaking, unlike anything else.
2. Get a shitload of users and free PR machine gets rolling. Network effects kick in.
3. Go to investors with your active user count in excess of millions.
4. Investors go bonkers and their eyes swell up with all the ways they can exploit these addicted-to-free user base.
5. Company has trouble monetizing the users. Users are pissed.
6. We all wonder why they couldn't make billions.
It just happened to Elastic search a couple of months ago when Amazon swiped the rug from under them. Good. This should be a lesson to all the companies that want to follow this pattern. Without Step 1, Docker would have had a much more difficult time to get traction and would have to compete on a level ground. So, they short circuit this competition by going full 100% free product route.
I have zero empathy for these companies and their investors.
The key point is to get users addicted to free.
Uber did this by undercutting the entire taxi industry at a loss. Ever wondered why your rides were so cheap!? Jio did the same in India, offer free unlimited internet on their phone service and wipe out the competition.
Docker is popular because it’s free. A lot of people would be upset if they take down their free hosting repositories.
As a user, I want to pay for stuff to sustain companies. They can still be open source.
My understanding (as a complete outsider) is that they raised a $10+ million series A for their PaaS. The PaaS then presumably wasn't successful enough to raise a subsequent round, but one of their technologies (Docker) was, despite the monetization path for it not being clear yet. So they pivoted to focus on that.
I'm not sure what other outcome could plausibly happen in this scenario. If they stuck with the PaaS as their main focus, they would have gone out of business many years ago.
Wow, imagine being so hateful towards amazing open-source tools
How is that being hateful? I am looking out for the community in this sense.
What's not working well?
I wonder what's next for Elastic. And mongodb etc. And all their users and customers
When open-source companies invite more contributions from their community, haters will complain that they’re “harassing the community for monetization”.
Simply put, some people will never be happy no matter what Docker does, and clearly you are one of them.
> I have zero empathy for these companies and their investors.
Are you trolling? Or do you want to see all amazing open source tech move behind closed doors and payed walled gardens?
F/OSS software works best when it's not a revenue source of the business that develops it. "Hey, I ran into $problem at $work and created $project to fix it! I'm giving it away so that it might solve your problem too! Hit me up on $mailing_list if you want to contribute." Red Hat is pretty much the poster child of this model. They make $0 on all the FOSS software they develop and release to the world but they dogfood it into their own products to collect dividends.
Containers existed for decades as a concept and for years on Linux (using lxc or VirtSquare and later nspawn)
Are we pissed?
Docker hasn't started showing me ads or spewing MOTDs asking for donations.
I haven't run into limitations that would have me purchase an upgrade.
It hasn't been bought by a proprietary company that would make me start worrying about its licencing.
It's a solid workhorse that's been at all my previous jobs and will be at all my future jobs for the foreseeable future.
Most criticisms of it boil down to "there are other container technologies".
I guess some of the reasons for the popularity of Kubernetes could be:
- Kubernetes had Google as a big name behind it, so there was a lot of development resources put into it and eventually, lots of learning resources available, in addition to overall publicity; for example, i don't think anything like this exists for Docker Swarm https://www.katacoda.com/courses/kubernetes
- in addition to the marketing and PR, it got picked up as a solution for many managed offerings by cloud hosts (managed Docker Swarm has almost none), a bit like what happened with serverless and AWS Lambda
- Kubernetes allows for CRDs, has a pretty good API and has a large ecosystem built around it, to help manage its complexity (even distros like K3s and MicroK8s could be mentioned), as well as many to implement additional functionality (Istio + Kiali come to mind)
- this further snowballed into turn-key offerings like Rancher and OpenShift that had financial incentives behind them, the idea of building a new distro that vendor locks clients into a particular company's offering, resources, support etc.
- almost everyone (oftentimes incorrectly) believes that they need to be able to scale a lot and therefore chased the hype
- FOMO further motivated a whole bunch of developers to use Kubernetes for their projects, instead of looking at the alternatives like Docker Swarm or Nomad
- however, knowing Kubernetes can help to be more easily onboarded and to work with deployments in many different companies (except for when it isn't), the skills carry over nicely
Personally, i think something between Docker Swarm, Nomad and K3s would be the sweet spot for containerized app deployments and orchestration, but personally i just like the Docker Compose manifests more than i do Kubernetes' and it feels like the popularity of Helm (or Kustomize) supports this line of reasoning.
Ideally we wouldn't even need containers and something like FreeBSD jails with a user friendly API around it would be sufficient. But the popularity that Docker gained seems to highlight that perhaps something was missing from those older technologies.
I would put money on it being the Dockerfile and the developer UX around that.
I don't honestly find it any more slick to use than e.g. FreeBSD jails, but I've lived in unix for long enough that that's because I was re-using lots of knowledge I already had.
There's a comparison here to the fact that I'm perfectly comfortable writing SysV rc scripts (though BSD rc scripts are vastly more pleasant to put together) but I've watched enough people struggle their way to something that only mostly worked that I can see why for many people writing a systemd unit file instead is a vast improvement.
Pretty much every other option was more closed and with no extensibility, plus docker swarm was plagued (at least from my PoV) with stories of instability... and I dunno about others, but I and various people I talked with were burned with running docker in production, something that k8s nicely repackaged removing a lot of the things that were problematic.
All this went into giving some serious base beyond marketing and PR - the closest I've seen from other players is classic Rancher and Nomad, and especially the latter seems much less capable.
I do ask the same question for all those other systems, or the meta-question: "How is it that the bloated monstrosity of Kubernetes somehow became the de-facto container orchestration tool?"
Is this just sysadmins buying themselves job security?
I could use docker swarm, or nomad, but I have to manage infrastructure, write my own integrations, manage the underlying hardware.
Or I can run az aks create and be off to the races
But how did it get to that point? How did something so big and unwieldy that even billion-dollar cloud providers can't do upgrades on it properly (*cough* looking at you, EKS) become the go-to standard for running apps in containers?
Devs chose K8s, I think the evangelism phrase was “developer dopamine”. It felt like the Rails of DIY infra, where devs could inherit an opinioned pattern for doing n>1.
There’s still decades of resentment of devs being gated by IT.
I'm not seeing anything in their comment that would imply this.
I used it extensively at a job for deploying production replicas for developers and full-integration testing (the plan was to eventually deploy prod the same way). It was SO nice to use. If you could use docker-compose, then docker-swarm was a natural next step.
I can't remember the details (it's been a few years), but the biggest hangup I had was the default network "mesh" wasn't stable. But I was able to work around that by using a different implementation (i think it was the network mesh that came out of k8s at the time. Used etcd).
That and, unfortunately, the cloud vendors could fully deploy k8s for free because swarm was a hybrid enterprise product.
I'd expect the valuation to be lower also, but that's based on their revenue prospects, not their the $ amount of investments.
It is not entrenched at all, that's their problem. You can literally drop in Podman as a replacement and alias the command it it will "just work" - and Podman has some significant advantages in many environments/use cases. Docker, the company or the product, has no concrete barriers to entry to protect itself.