Folks, the docker runtime is open source, and not even the only one of its kind. They won’t charge for that. If they tried to make it closed source, everyone would just laugh and switch to one of several completely free alternatives. They charge for hosting images, build time on their build servers, and various “premium” developer tools you don’t need. In fact, you need none of this, you can do all of it yourself on whatever hardware you deem to be good enough. There are also many other hosted alternatives out there.
Docker thinks they have a monopoly, for some reason. If you use the technology, you are probably already aware that they don’t.
Does that include running Windows containers? It seems like the alternatives don’t support those.
Windows container runtime is free as well, simply install the docker runtime from chocolatey or winget along with the Windows Containers and Hyper-V windows features. This is what we do on some build machines for CI.
Theres no reason to use desktop other than “ease of use”
There are some reasons. Networking can get messed up, so Docker Desktop “fixed that” for you, but the dirty secret is it’s basically a Linux VM with Docker CE and some convenience network routes.
Youre talking about Linux containers on Windows, I think commenter above was referring to windows containers on Windows, which is its own special hell for lucky folks like me.
Otherwise I totally agree. Ive done both setups without docker desktop.
Wait…y’all were paying for Docker?
Corp accounts, Docker Desktop isn’t free for non-personal use
That gives me an idea - managers can ask staff to learn the CLI and give them gift cards for what it would have cost to license the Docker Desktop client 🧠
Hot take: Good for them.
This will have zero impact on 99% of independent developers. Most small companies can move to an alternative or roll their own infrastructure. This will only really impact large corporations. I’m all for corporation-on-corporation violence. Let them fight.
This is a different take on the VMscare broadcom purchase.
The real losers here are SoHos where it is too pricy to migrate and also too pricy not to. I don’t know whether that’s in your 1% or 99% but:
- devs don’t develop for infrastructure their customers don’t use. It’s as dead as LKC, then.
- big customers have deprecated their VMware infra and are only spending on replacement products, and if they do the same for docker the company will suffer in a year.
If docker doesn’t have the gov/mil revenue, are we prepared for the company shedding projects and people as it shrinks?
Remember: when tech elephants fight, it’s we the grass who suffers.
Their entire offering is such a joke. I’m forced to use Docker Desktop for work, as we’re on Windows. Every time that piece of shit gets updated, it’s more useless garbage. Endless security snake oil features. Their installer even messes with your WSL home directory. They literally fuck with your AWS and Azure credentials to make it more “convenient” for you to use their cloud integrations. When they implemented that, they just deleted my AWS profile from my home directory, because they felt it should instead be a symlink to my Windows home directory. These people are not to be trusted with elevated privileges on your system. They actively abuse the privilege.
The only reason they exist is that they are holding the majority of images hostage on their registry. Their customers are similarly being held hostage, because they started to use Docker on Windows desktops and are now locked in. Nobody gives a shit about any of their benefits. Free technology and hosting was their setup, now they let everyone bleed who got caught. Prices will rise until they find their sweet spot. Thanks for the tech. Now die already.
Enshitification is a very, very real thing. GitLab did something similar with raising pricing by 5x a few years back.
Are You guys really pulling more than 40 images per hour? Isn’t the free one enough?
A single malfunctioning service that restarts in a loop can exhaust the limit near instantly. And now you can’t bring up any of your services, because you’re blocked.
I’ve been there plenty of times. If you have to rely on docker.io, you better pay up. Running your own NexusRM or Harbor to proxy it can drastically improve your situation though.
Docker is a pile of shit. Steer clear entirely of any of their offerings if possible.
I use docker at home and at work, nexus at work too. I really don’t understand… even a malfunctioning service should not pull the image over and over, there should be a cache… It could be some fringe case, but I have never experienced it.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what caused you to be blocked from Docker Hub due to rate-limiting. When you’re in that scenario, it’s most cost efficient to buy your way out.
If you can’t even imagine what would lead up to such a situation, congratulations, because it really sucks.
Yes, there should be a cache. But sometimes people force pull images on service start, to ensure they get the latest “latest” tag. Every tag floats, not just “latest”. Lots of people don’t pin digests in their OCI references. This almost implies wanting to refresh cached tags regularly. Especially when you start critical services, you might pull their tag in case it drifted.
Consider you have multiple hosts in your home lab, all running a good couple services, you roll out that new container runtime upgrade to your network, it resets all caches and restarts all services. Some pulls fail. Some of them are for DNS and other critical services. Suddenly your entire network is down, and you can’t even get on the Internet, because your pihole doesn’t start. You can’t recover, because you’re rate-limited.
I’ve been there a couple of times until I worked on better resilience, but relying on docker.io is still a problem in general. I did pay them for quite some time.
This is only one scenario where their service bit me. As a developer, it gets even more unpleasant, and I’m not talking commercial.
the enshittification begins…
Begins?!? Docker Inc was waist deep in enshittification the moment they started rate limiting docker hub, which was nearly 3 or 4 years ago.
This is just another step towards the deep end. Companies that could easily move away from docker hub, did so years ago. The companies that remain struggle to leave and will continue to pay.
When that happened our DevOps teams migrated all our prod k8’s to podman, with zero issues. Docker who?
Why would anybody use podman for k8s…containerd is the default for years.
Maybe you can run containerd with podman… I haven’t checked. I just run k3s myself.
Anyone looking for a free drop in replacement, I’ve been using Rancher Desktop without any issues https://rancherdesktop.io/
I’ve been using podman desktop (https://podman-desktop.io/) which is also free. I’ve never heard of rancher desktop so I’ll have to give that a look!
Rancher is owned by Suse, which is mainly a solid steward in the community.
They also have k8 frontend called Harvestor. It can run VMs directly, which is nice.
Well, there is this one thing: they asked OpenSuse to drop the Suse branding…
Which is fair. Fedora never called itself red hat. CentOS never called itself red hat.
Suse is a pretty good company and deserves the right to their intellectual property and trademarks. OpenSuse shouldn’t make a big deal out of simply changing their name.
They could rename themselves to OpenSusame and keep rolling without any issues whatsoever.
I thought docker was FOSS? What exactly are they charging you for?
Docker Engine (which is the core of what people think of as “Docker”) is FOSS. Docker Desktop (which most people rely on for local development) is free for individuals but I believe the license says companies over a certain size are required to pay.
And on top of that the paid plans also come with support, which large businesses frequently require, and private repositories on docker’s image repository.
Glad I run everything in a VM. If you want my money you can accept donations, and sell support contracts.
The moment you hide features or code behind a paywall or proprietary license, is the moment you no longer get my fucking money.
Granted random weirdos who donate to FLOSS projects probably weren’t paying dockers bill anywho.
How is the transition from docker to podman? I’m using two compose scripts and like 10 containers each. And portainer to comfortably restart stuff on the fly
from what I can gather its currently recommended to use quadlets to generate systemd units to achieve what compose was doing. podman compose is a thing but IIRC I didn’t find that was straight drop in and I had to change the syntax or formatting a bit for it to work and from the brief testing I have put in quadlets seems less hassle, but if you use a non systemd distro then I don’t know.
