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Comment by mattgreenrocks | Hacker News Reader

This gets at something I've never quite understood about Docker. And it might be a dumb question: why do we need a dedicated host for Docker images in the first place?

I can see the use case for base images: they're the canonical, trusted source of the image.

But for apps that are packaged? Not as much. I mean, if I'm using a PaaS, why can't I just upload my Docker image to them, and then they store it off somewhere and deploy it to N nodes? Why do I have to pay (or stay within a free tier) to host the blob? Many PaaS providers I've seen are happy to charge a few more bucks a month just to host Docker images.

I'm not seeing any sort of value added here (and maybe that's the point).

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You can host OCI images anywhere. Unfortunately, this breaks all of the tutorials people use to develop software.

So, on a technical level, obviously you don't. "docker image import" allows images to be stored anywhere you want.

But obviously the real problem is that you're asking the wrong question. We don't "need" a centralized image repository. We WANT one, because the feature that Docker provides that "just use a tarball" doesn't (in addition to general ease-of-use, of course) is authentication, validation and security. And that's valuable, which is why people here are so pissed off that it's being locked behind a paywall.

But given that it has value... sorry folks, someone's got to pay for it. You can duplicate it yourself, but that is obviously an engineering problem with costs.

Just write the check if you're a heavy user. It's an obvious service with an obvious value proposition. It just sucks if it wasn't part of your earlier accounting.

> It just sucks if it wasn't part of your earlier accounting.

I generally agree with you, but to be fair to the complainers, what sucks is that Docker didn't make it clear up front that it should be part of your accounting. I don't know if they always intended to monetize this way (if so, we'd call that a bait and switch) or if they sincerely had other plans that just didn't pan out, but either way the problem is the same: There's a trend across all of technology of giving your stuff away for free until you become the obvious choice for everything, then suddenly altering the deal and raising prices.

That kind of behavior has in the past been deemed anticompetitive and outlawed, because it prevents fair competition between solutions on their merits and turns it into a competition for who has the deepest war chest to spend on customer-acquisition-by-free-stuff.

Business isn't static. Costs and operations are not static.

At one point Docker probably may have had an authentic intent for a free service, but costs along the way changed the reality of operations and long-term cash flow and success of the business required making changes. Maybe the cash saved from bandwidth is what makes the next project possible that helps them grow the bottom line.

Further what was once a positive value proposition 18 months ago can turn into a losing proposition today, and a company should be allowed to adapt to new circumstances and be allowed to make new decisions without being anchored and held back by historical decisions (unless under contract).

As fun as it is hold executives to unrealistic standards, they're not fortune-tellers that can predict the future and they're making the best possible decisions they can given the constraints they're under. And I don't begrudge them if those decisions are in their own best interest, such as is their responsibility.

I'll give Docker the benefit of the doubt that this wasn't a bait-and-switch, that they never excepted it to become so successful, and that costs outpaced their ability to monetize the success and were eating into cash reserves faster than plan. I think the current outcome isn't so bad, and that we're still getting a considerable amount of value for free. It's unfortunate that some people are only finding out now, and are now under pressure to address an issue they didn't sign up for.

They announced limits changes were going to happen on this date over a year ago. They've slowly ratcheted down limits for the past few years.

Everyone on here cries about this behaviour unless they're the ones with stakes in a biz and their stocks going up up up. Then suddenly it's just business.

Alternatively, some people on here complain and others on here say it's just business, and those are two different groups of people.

Forcing the client to default to a centralized repo only provides value to docker though, not to the customers.

If there was no value provided to customers, then why are people in this thread so angry? They're angry because something valuable they used to get for free now requires money!

Standing up your own registry is trivial at the kind of scales (dozens-to-hundreds of images pulls per day!) that we're talking about. It's just expensive, so people want Docker, Inc. to do it for free. Well...

Because it's a classic EEE-style technique. You force (or very strongly encourage) customers to use your system instead of any competing system. Then, only when all the customers are using your system, and all the competitors are out of business because they don't get customers any more, you rug-pull the customers for money. This wouldn't be a problem if you always had to specify a system when pulling an image, because Docker would be on equal ground to everyone else.

> authentication, validation and security

Those are generally solved using SSL, no need for centralized storage.

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