So many people in this thread don’t understand how enterprise decisions get made.
The business license costs $21/month, probably less in reality.
Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?
Any alternative has switching costs and risks. Companies will just pay this. I see so many people saying “just do these 10 steps and it’s basically the same”. It just ain’t worth it for $250
That’s assuming some kind soul in engineering management has the patience and leverage to guide this through 10 layers of purchasing, procurement, finance, legal etc…
Another likely outcome is that it’s “easier” for teams to switch to another tool (easier in that at least they’re not waiting on a third party for approval) and everyone loses a lot of time
Big corporations are not the most efficient beasts for this kind of situation
I've been fortunate enough to work at companies where engineers were trusted to make small purchasing decisions. It works well for a while, but eventually everyone accumulates a lot of random recurring charges and the company cracks down.
$21 is nothing for a one-time spend.
$21 per month per employee is now $252/year per employee, but now you also need someone managing all of these licenses and accounting. Every new employee or team change requires some juggling of licenses with associated turn-around times before that person can get started.
It's not bad when it's just a couple key pieces of software, but it doesn't take long before every engineer has some mix of 20 different subscription tools and platforms and licenses and you're on the phone with a different vendor every week doing the annual subscription renewal pricing negotiation dance. The sales people know how this works and would prefer to wear you down with endless conference calls until you get tired of negotiating and just pay the new, higher price they're asking.
Soon, all of those "cheap" tools have added up to $1000/month or more per employee with a couple people dedicated to managing these licenses and negotiating with vendors all of the time. And it's terrible.
When the tool isn't easily replaceable, you deal with it. I'm not sure I see that with Docker Desktop, though. When you get a new hire, do you tell them to submit a ticket with licensing and wait until they can get their Docker Desktop license? Or do you simply write some documentation about how to accomplish tasks without using Docker Desktop so you can remove another external dependency? Teams generally gravitate toward the latter.
This poster has clearly worked at the same kind of companies I have. Plenty of them would gladly burn 10x what it would cost to just buy the damn license on engineering man-hours switching something that's inferior but free. Because it doesn't show up as an expense on the annual budget.
The concept of opportunity cost is completely lost on a lot of business leaders.
Buying anything on my organization costs something around $10k. Add your price to this to discover the total we are spending.
That's on financial cost. The opportunity cost of stopping technical people to handle the technical details of an acquisition is just huge, and larger the most differentiation there is on the market.
Heh heh... so true it hurts. Why spend 3 years pushing it past risks reviews and oversight committees when you could just write a crappy version that does what you need?
Legal alone will spend months looking at run-of-the-mill software contacts trying to negotiate absurd concessions from vendors in situations where they clearly have no bargaining power.
We can spend a lot of money on Oracle for their profoundly obtuse products though.
Yep, I’ve been there, I was a consultant in London charging 700 pounds a day, and my hands were tied because of a silly 50 USD license expense and couldn’t work for a month.
I asked if I could just pay it myself, but was told that would violate the IT department guidelines and possibly an SLA too, so I just sat there for a month, reminding everyone at the daily stand ups I was blocked. I couldn’t believe it.
I was not the only one who was tied in red tape there, it was indeed normal.
This company was making 600 million a year in profit.
Perhaps you're not understanding corporate bureaucracy. Nobody wants to be the manager who gets fired for trying to save $25k by switching from Docker Desktop to {insert random open source project here}. Not only is it not worth the time or the risk, but the engineering manager's exact purpose is to traverse the corporate bureaucracy. It gives them job security. Plus the engineering manager can negotiate big discounts with the vendor and can brag about that on their own performance reviews.
It's very impactful though, it'll probably be people seeing it as highly visible and career-advancing who manage to muster the 'patience and leverage'.
If the org's been thoughtful to in advance, it's at the level of being almost an operational risk - all of engineering uses this tool, tool's licence or pricing might change, retooling has an associated cost and down-time.
Easier method to deal with monthly payment...Create a purchase order with 12 lines. One line for each month with dollar amounts defined. The purchase order serves as the "approval" so Accounts Payable can process without asking for coding information.
Example: I only have to revisit licensing once a year, to create a new 12 line purchase order. It's still a pain but I prefer purchase orders vs dealing with credit cards. In addition, querying expense history for purchase order lines provides far more detail vs querying a credit card platform. Credit card history tends to go into a black hole.
One possible hitch...Some companies might restrict Accounts Payable from receiving purchase orders for separation-of-duties reasons.
You can drill through layers of that crap if you can sell something through aws marketplace or equivalent thing that your company is already set up to spend millions a month.
Not sure how would that work for a desktop tool. It's in them to figure that out though
When you've spent enough time in the IT Department, you'll see companies demand that you "cut laptop costs" or similar. Because when you're buying 250 laptops a year, the people with the budgets go "OMG we're spending half a million a year on laptops". So changes are made to the configuration, maybe small SSD but often times it'll be something like less RAM, or slower CPU - because purchasing controls aren't that fine. Great, you've now cut $200 per laptop and the money people are excited to see you've saved $50,000/year.
Do they understand that now there are 250 people, which probably all cost more than $100,000/year, whom aren't quite as efficient as they could be? Nope. And they don't care. The budget says you get X. The personnel cost is attributed in some other category not to be touched.
Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this product. It's not in budget."
Lastly the per-employee cost adds up. It's $11/mo for SSO. $18/mo for email suite. $19/mo for Gitlab. $14/mo for Jira. $5/mo for Confluence. $3/mo just to put SAML on Jira & Confluence. $8/mo for Password vault. $12/mo for Slack. $17/mo fro Zoom. $17/mo for Lucidchart. $12/mo for Laptop MDM. That's not everything an employee needs, heck it doesn't even cover HR products (Workday? 15Five? Applicant Tracking?), Training (probably a couple of those), EDR/AV for laptops, and dozens of other smaller services. Sure adding another $21/mo isn't going to change the number a lot on an individual basis, but it adds up really fast when you multiply it out across all your Developers.
And don't forget. How do you rationalize that your container software costs more than your source code control solution? One of those two things you can very easily live without... and it's Docker.
Let me add something useful here and say that it even has a name:
"subscription fatigue"
I was fine paying Netflix for an all-I-can-watch even if I ended up watching less than a DVDs worth of content just for the convenience of not keeping a stack of DVDs around.
I'm not fine with paying Netflix, HBO, Disney, my cable provider, NRK (state owned broadcastee,mandatory) etc etc a monthly or yearly fee.
So I just drop it: it is not like I need to watch it.
Same with tools: I'm happy to bug my company to pay for IntelliJ as long as NetBeans is stuck in its current spot, we already pay for Jira and Confluence but I am always seeking out the open source solutions, - partially because I'm old enough to realize that $n in subscription means $n x 12 x m devs a year, partially no cost open source (contrary to popular belief here) is less hassle and partially because going proprietary feels like paying Dane geld.
Edit:
> Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this product. It's not in budget."
Probably true in most places and it is sometimes a problem.
But that institutional hesitation is also a powerful defense against every vendor who wants to inject themselves somewhere and then start jacking up the prices.
The places where I worked there's an inverse relationship - the smaller the cost, the harder it is to justify with finances. ($4000 monthly AWS bill for "testing purposes"? No questions asked. $10 wireless mouse? Mission impossible!)
In case you aren't aware, it's easy to explain by that fact that most finance departments are afraid to question your spendings on grounds of looking incompetent.
So it's less about 10$ and more about: "I understand what a wireless mouse is and it doesn't look mission critical to me."
"No idea what those items on that AWS bill mean, but I'll probably be better off not asking"
Exactly. Cost is a proxy for importance (usually). I can’t be bothered to approve your $10 mouse, but I can be bothered to approve your $10k AWS budget.
I honestly don't think I could get Docker Desktop through our procurement process before the end of the grace period. It's not a matter of "this is peanuts" as much as "we're guaranteed to breach the license terms if we keep using this thing, so everyone has to get off it now." And then once it's gone, we'll limp along with whatever plugs the gap until something else emerges a as a winner, which probably won't be Docker Desktop.
That sort of depends on the size of business under discussion. If you are a Fortune 500 with 2,000 engineers who all need licenses... half a million in licensing costs is not always the easiest sell.
Of course, that fortune 500 is going to pick up the phone and demand to pay 1/4 of that (and they'll probably get it). Enterprise sales is fun
Many engineers at large companies won't want to bother dealing with the headaches around licensing software and spending money, whether it's $2/mo or $21/mo or $200/mo.
If it's a core part of my job and the best option available, it'd be worth it, but if there's any reasonable alternative, I'll go download that today instead of wading through all of the lawyers and approvals and compliance to use something slightly better.
If you already have a live deployment then the company's bigger fear is the a risk of switching to a completely new infrastructure and they'll all of a sudden push the paperwork quickly to stay on their existing codebase.
It’s not at all about the price. Obviously a corporation can afford that. It’s the sheer dread of even starting the procurement process in your average corporation that your average developer must overcome, that is the barrier.
I’d rather investigate an alternative like running it on a VM than deal with that. Actually I’d rather shave my face with some mace in the dark than deal with that.
>Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?
Tech companies? No, they will probably cough up until they have another solution.
IT departments in non-tech companies? Yes. I fully expect a circus there. Many won't have known it was being used, purchasing will have their ego bruised by a company "hijacking" them and won't want to pay, and so on.
> Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?
I work for a big enterprise that is currently going through a transition that is simultaneously a cloud transition and a transition to more critically consider tooling with license management overhead (which for a $21/seat license, is probably a significantly larger cost in a big, bureaucratic enterprise than the license cost itself.)
That said, there's a good argument that the things that you get for that $21/seat are things many enterprises will find are still worth the license cost + license management overhead. On the other hand, most of that is stuff that doesn't scale with number of developer seats, so a subscription model that doesn't work on that basis and therefore doesn't impose the kind of license management overhead that per-seat licensing does would probably net Docker more revenue while imposing less total costs on enterprises.
Do you guys not realize that I know that? I did the maths standardized to one seat.
I’m not also suggesting that the entire engineering spend for 100+ person companies is $250k/year.
Do the analysis on a per unit cost because that’s how life works: per unit cost of human capital and per unit cost of software vs. per unit value creation.
It's not the amount of money that is the issue, the issue is that it this wasn't budgeted into the project when it was proposed 2 years ago. It is software that falls under category S which means you can't use overhead funds it has to be a category S purchase, but you have no category S funds budgeted to the project because you were using free software.
Being so cheap actually complicates the matters even more, since the finance people don't really want to mess with purchases less than $5,000, even though it is their own rule that requires all software to go through them regardless of cost. It just means they won't be willing to help very much.
If companies want to roll their own they can, but most won't. Docker Desktop adds a lot of value if only by removing the hassle for quick os-agnostic development.
I work remotely for large corporation (over 100k employees) and it wastes on average an hour of my productivity every day on stupid stuff. For example my office PC becomes unavailable every time it gets an update, at least once a week. They force restart during working hours. If there is somebody in the office I can call them to reboot it, if not I have to drive there. Everybody has the same problem. Meetings are disrupted, plans are thrown in disarray, people are loosing sometimes entire day of work.
The problem has been known before covid and has not been solved.
Any normal logical person would throw resources into solving the problem, but the people responsible just say they are busy and why is that a big problem if you can just press reboot?
I think you don't understand how big company procurement work. Getting legal's and procurement's attention to look at this is more effort than its worth. The logistics of managing licenses, single sign-on, etc is a nightmare. Besides, running docker is already frowned upon by InfoSec and require special permission. It will never happen where I work. Not because of money, but because it's too much trouble.
> Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?
Not just "think" - I know for a fact.
Finance refuses to spend money if there is a "free" alternative, and Architecture rejects all software that isn't OSS licensed without a lengthy review process. It would take us at least 3 months to get approvals and POs for all the devs, if it even got approved, but more likely it would be in "batches" of licenses, further delaying roll-out. So instead the devs are beginning to install Linux VMs to run Docker from, or looking at podman.
People forget that just because there's a "rational" decision, doesn't mean people (or businesses) will choose it. Businesses are run by humans, and humans are irrational and dumb. Path of least resistance wins.
The pricing model for this is really stupid. A $21/mo subscription is a pain in the ass — they would be better off just selling it perpetual for $1000.
I ran a big enterprise shop for years. Nuisance licensing like this costs a fortune - I’d need to go do legal review, have it tracked for renewals and compliance, etc. Freemium product like this is always coupled with a stupid license enforcement audit that appears and tries to extort you. For a small quantity, overhead may be more than the product.
As an enterprise consumer, it makes me question the viability of the company. $250 a year is priced to allow unit managers to use P-Cards to avoid procurement processes. It’s too cheap to make meaningful amounts of money, so unless it’s a way to shift me to a more intelligent model, I’d have folks assigned to investigate alternatives.
I love the term “nuisance licensing”. Considering how everyone and their grandmother is switching to subscription models I wonder why it didn't come up earlier.
It seems like 200k+ is pretty typical for Engineers with at least some experience even in less hot markets like the Midwest. I know several developers in the Metro Detroit area making more than 200k base.
I guess it depends on the enterprise. I can imagine the thoughts of certain managers: Recurring costs? Something that used to be free and now they want money? Pricing per user? More expensive than Office 365?
If docker and containerization is not yet widely used in the company, a lot of decisionmakers will not buy it, because they did fine without it for decades ;)
That price is per person, not total. The highest total I've heard so far is going to cost that company $108k a month, for a development tool.
VCs are shooting themselves in the foot here: it is very obvious that we should never adopt any technical tool backed by VC, because they will eventually try to make us an offer we can't refuse and then go out of business shortly thereafter when their extortion attempt doesn't work.
> That price is per person, not total. The highest total I've heard so far is going to cost that company $108k a month, for a development tool.
Lol yes, I know. My point was the cost of meatware is 3 orders of magnitude greater than the software, and likely less at scale.
$100k/mo would mean 5,000 devs. I highly doubt a company with overheads near/in excess of a billion dollars/year is going to sweat a $1m expense for core infra like Docker.
I think you're correct about existing users at large corporations. Converting all those into paid accounts is a no-brainer.
However, this will have a massive change on the competitive landscape. For companies that haven't yet adopted Docker, this is a huge red checkmark. This change is going to spur development on open source alternatives like nothing else could.
$21 / user / month - so if you have 100 engineers that's $2100 a month or $25k a year.
Still should be doable for most businesses that size but licensing costs can blow up when you start to have a lot of seats. An annoying thing about the company I work for is that they have a limited number of licenses for things like IDEs, so they ration them. And so I'll boot up an IDE for a language I work in less - like say, PyCharm - and it will stop working because my license got taken away and given to someone else. I'll have to request another one be given back to get working again, which is pretty annoying when I'm trying to get something done. I work mostly with Docker / Kubernetes so if I'm in a situation where my core tools are being constantly taken away, I'll be pretty miffed.
I agree that Docker has every right to charge big companies for this software. Just wanted to point out that the costs can be more than you'd expect.
Local dev environments are used because it's what people are used to, and they're low friction to start using. The problem is that they're actually quite difficult to maintain at scale. Large businesses spend a considerable amount of time debugging local developer environments. Cloud IDEs have been popping up and are finally to the point of being usable (and in some cases even better than a local dev env).
My company was already somewhat interested in checking out hosted IDEs, and today this pushed us to start some proof of concepts to move some teams over to github's codespaces.
So, yes, businesses will adjust their workflows to avoid the cost since many were already interested in improving their workflows and relieving some of the burden on their developer environment tooling teams.
> Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?
YES! I've seen it. Stinginess at my shop regularly causes hours and hours of pricey engineering resources to address problems caused by underallocating cloud resources to the point things fail - or refusal to allow some cloud service because it will cost $100/month (despite saving 10s of thousands in eng resources)
That would be the wise thing to do, but I'm sure there are some ways companies will eff it up anyway. Survival of the fittest I guess.
Management may want some badge of honor for saving a budget line item. Or developers may want to embark on a new and interesting project and successfully convince management it's a good idea, who will agree for a wide range of reasons (not pissing off developers might be one of them).
Both will ignore the risk and considerable downsides. Happens all the time.
>>>Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?
Hahahahaha, yes, absolutely. Because if the wrong VP gets this in his head, it's not $250/year, it's "almost half a million dollars over 3 years" for the 500 employees or whatever. I've seen it happen.
True. Absolutely. But I guarantee you that this headline means that even junior "devops" engineers will have workable alternatives by tomorrow, and can tell you how to implement them with little friction.
Yeah that's great in theory. In practice you have to go to the official route (tm). Here's some of my experiences:
1) Internship at a well known tech corporation. I was on a project that would accelerate the debugging and diagnostic of a machine the whole factory depended on; tl;dr I was making an app to replace an overgrown Excel sheet. To do that we used an opensource library but the catch was that the maintainer made its money by placing the documentation under a paywall. At some point the project was going well but the leftovers from Google Code could not do anymore. So it took two months (TWO MONTHS!) to do a $15 USD one time payment with the company's credit card. Apparently the process took longer due to the fact we had to go through PayPal.
2) Another multi billion corporation, less big but still multinational. They spent hours and lots of money on internal propaganda to promote their "core values"; which of course included "agility". We wanted to buy a commercial code analysis tool to save time during code reviews and increase code quality of a code base where ~30 devs worked. No brainier right? We had the R&D department's VP's OK to buy the damn thing and ask for forgiveness to the mother ship later. After 6 months our team leader was still receiving calls and and form to fill. "Do you really need this? Did you think about other products? Did you have the OK from this person thousand of miles away and this other person who speaks in a very broken English?" Using the company's internal organism and salary tables we estimated that during those six months they have wasted about 5 years of licensing in salary.
Please don't post personal swipes or unsubstantive comments.
If you know more than other people, that's great, but then please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. If you can't do that or don't want to, that's fine, but then please don't post.
A company with 100 $250k/year engineers would be billed about $250k/year for this license. Any half competent manager is going to realize that money would be better spend on a single engineer focused on tooling, who can replace Docker Desktop in addition to working on other efficiency improvements.
This appears to be cutting of their nose to spite their face. We have a team of 50+ engineers that all use Docker for Mac for daily development tasks, but I suspect that will no longer be true in a rather short amount of time. Frankly, I don’t really know if anybody actually uses the UI components for it outside of starting and stopping the engine and for basic configuration of the VM. Everything else that comes with it is just useless cruft for our use cases.
As soon as there is a viable alternative (and I’d be happy to contribute to the effort), I’ll be moving away from Docker for Mac.
For the Mac, just get Canonical’s Multipass (http://multipass.run) and do an apt-get to install Docker into a VM and use VS Code to “remote” to it. It will automatically install the Docker extension inside the Linux VM and you’re set.
For Windows, use WSL2 and do the same.
Both can mount “local” folders, although the setup is obviously different.
You now have a better way to manage containers than ever before.
Why run Docker inside a VM on a Mac, when you can just run the Linux dev environment directly inside the VM? That's just starting to sound like Docker for the sake of Docker.
Multipass, Qemu, and Parallels can all provide a solid VM on Mac host. All you need after that is your dev environment VM guest image to deploy to the team.
Isn't paying their fee also contributing to the effort of what they've put in to it so far, and ideally what they'll do to keep it working and improve over time?
So you have a tool that your team use daily, but won’t pay a small license for it? I’m not sure I understand that logic. If the tool you have worked for you when it was free, it still works for you when you pay a small cost per month. Unless the cost is really that huge, I don’t see why that would be a reason to change.
I think it is mostly the issue of dealing with byzantine corporate procurement processes. Also, it's really not all the clear what value-add Docker for Desktop is. Essentially it is just doing what you can do using the OSS components (running a Linux VM which runs the docker daemon and mounting a Unix socket on the host machine to talk to it). The only "value add" is a UI app on the host machine which I have never once used personally or witnessed anyone else using.
I certainly don't begrudge Docker for trying to create a sustainable business, but as an "open core" model it's really hard to understand what their proprietary extensions are that people will want to pay for. They took a stab at the container orchestration space with Docker Swarm (which you could definitely imagine having an "enterprise version") but that lost out pretty definitively to Kubernetes. So they're left with Docker Hub? That just doesn't seem like it will really be much of a revenue generator. You're either using whatever cloud container registry is available (ECR, GCR etc) or you're using a more general artifact repository like Artifactory, GitHub which can be a container registry as well as a Maven/NPM/etc artifact repository.
I made https://github.com/lime-green/remote-docker-aws a while ago and I've been happily using it for about a year. It throws docker in a ec2 VM and allows you to call docker as if it were running locally by tunneling and syncing files. The network file systems I tried (sshfs, nfs) were way too slow when used as docker volumes so it uses a tool called unison which does two-way file syncing (rsync only does one way, which is a problem for something like making django migrations)
I've been doing development in docker, but unrelated to that I did an upgrade to big sur and borked the machine for a few days.
Pulling the same projects to my (admittedly quite fast) linux box in the cloud is night and day for speed in docker with volume mounts. Browserfy runs 5x faster, at least. Yarn install is 10x faster.
And it's reliable. Docker's filesharing on the mac has about a 25% failure rate that any given save will be properly picked up by watch, with a complete, uncorrupted, updated file.
You’re going to spend scarce engineering resources reimplementing a Docker for Mac alternative, then roll out your immature alternative to 50+ engineers, instead of paying a few hundred dollars a month for a good product and moving on?
It seems to me you would be the one cutting off your nose to spite your face in this scenario.
Assuming that you currently don‘t need any other than the functionality the free plan provides, and assuming all 50 engineers need a license, your „a few hundred dollars“ is actually $1‘250/month just for getting the same as before.
I understand (in some way) the decision Docker made but I am not sure it is the way-to-go. However, it is a very hard question and if I had to pay a monthly fee for each component I‘m using to develop a solution, one or the other project would not even start because it‘s not worth it anymore.
The reason this move isn't popular is because it seemed like local docker development (for any size corporation) was always going to be free. If I personally had known this was in the cards I would have invested (time, money and effort) into alternatives earlier on. Instead they killed all the competition and are now demanding money. So yeah, this is the first move by Docker that has made me kind of mad at the company.
How does this affect consultants that want to introduce docker to large corporations but small teams? A lot of scenarios become crappy now.
Personally I think just running portainer as a container is a viable alternative to docket desktop.
But I never really used the UI much, so perhaps there are features I don’t know of.
I tried getting podman working pointing at a Linux server and ram into issues as an alternative to Docker. I’m hoping the kinks get worked out and I can move over.
We have been using podman here for all of our developers and have yet to find anything different to docker. Perhaps you are using a more obscure feature.
Yeah, I used minikube for local dev on k8s services and ended up just using it for all Docker stuff after a while. It is slightly less ergonomic than Docker for Mac though especially with respect to DNS and network issues. For instance, the minikube VM and any containers running in it cannot by default use the host machines VPN, so if you have to connect to an external service over your corporate VPN then you need to do some extra config (which isn't very well documented) to make it work. And the setup I ended up using was to use the VPNKit socket that was part of Docker for Mac to make it work. Now VPNKit is also OSS so I'm sure you can get it to work without Docker for Mac at all but it's also not trivial.
Before Docker Desktop there existed a solution called docker toolkit that worked exactly like this. The only problem is that occasionally internal corporate networks will use the same ip address and you have to customize that by building your own docker engine.
Overall if they want to charge for their product that's fine. I just hate the model of release free or really permissible application, wait for widespread adoption, then tighten clamp. For what it's worth they've lost my business there.
Same with Telerik Fiddler recently. Good piece of software for debugging network requests on Windows.
Was free for as long as I've known it existed. Telerik recently bought by 'Progress' (ironic), software re-written in Electron and now charges a subscription to use it.
Docker desktop was never really free, as in free software, was it? If so, then it was always a proprietary app and they were always in control. IE. the clamp was always tight.
I often get laughed at when I say we should backup every tools/repositories/packages through a proxy and use only that in our internal processes. I also get scolded at making use our Dockerfiles only calls scripts a developer can use on his own machine or any other container manager once the "too good to be free" tech of the decade goes full Oracle on us.
Then everyone panics when a critical build stops working because some apt repository of some decades old distros is unplugged or some shell script piped directly to bash goes dark (or someone with a bit of security common sense rightfully has a panic attack) and we have to salvage it using some ex-employees backup images.
This is also why I just don't say I do devops because it just gets to a point where the "devops guys" are just the people you give the dirty jobs nobody wanna do.
This seems like a bit of a footgun from Docker Inc. Those on Linux will just run Docker Engine (the open source part) directly, or move to alternatives like Podman. Docker Desktop only really has value on macOS and Windows, and there it's only because nobody wants to manage the glue to setup a Linux VM. Given the cost, I suspect many will chose to do that glue work themselves and I wouldn't be surprised to see an open source project spring up to do that.
Everything else is handled by other parts of the ecosystem already, image registries both private and public, orchestration, etc.
It's a short sited move that will kill D.Desktop. It's not that these large corps don't have the money for this, it's how money is allocated in companies. Instead, now all hobby projects in large corp get killed fast and early because the hobbyist knows their project is doomed if the company isn't going to go for a new bill.
The hype/buzzword driven development surrounding micro services/containerization has hit middle America and enterprises spend dumb amounts of money on related projects. I can see them spending more money on Docker Desktop with no difficulty, because the incentive is not to save money.
macOS is the hard one to solve. It does a lot of magic things in the background and Docker even created their own "distro" / VM build system, linuxkit, that went on to be useful in a lot of other places to make it work.
A lot of macOS developers imo seem to have more knowledge in their specific domain and less in how to wire up a VM to look seamless, they'll need the docker CLI to work with the local filesystem to keep a lot of existing Makefiles functional, I see a bunch of companies caughing up money in the short term just for that.
Docker Desktop on Windows itself proves quite well that WSL2 works fine for this use case.
Honestly, I don't see a reason to keep Docker for Mac installed on my computer. I haven't run a container workload locally in I don't know how long and I haven't built a container locally in even longer. It's just taking up space on my laptop and bugging me to update what seems like constantly.
I personally support Docker Desktop for Mac for an organization of 250-300 engineers.
I have been supporting it for 2 years now. Been through all the Docker Desktop upgrades, performance issues everytthing. I have researched docker performance on macs running k3d + k3s + istio and a bunch of microservices. I have had to jump into the internals of Docker daemon and docker cli and networking to solve how docker networks are provisioned for various proxying issues.
1. Docker dragged their feet with native performance for file syncing. We have to selectively enable it and just so that it doesn't bog the machine down.
2. When running it gets the CPU running at 75-80C, causing the fan to run non-stop at 3000 rpm at least. It is definitely impact by bad macbook pro design, which is terrible at airflow and heat sink activities
3. We were on unstable for a bit to test the new file syncing approach. Docker dropped that in stable and said "deal with it"
4. The paid forced upgrade notification means that I can't peg the Docker Desktop version for the whole org at a certain version.
5. Right after we switch from the unstable to stable, the next minor version is a breaking change.
6. Number 4 would be fine it docker would keep to their guarantee of stable being stable. They do a terrible job of being backwards compatible. The current stable we had was 3.3.1. With the constant minor upgrades, and pushing people, some people went to 3.6.0. (the latest as of yesterday, Aug 30) This broke everything inexplicable with just a VM error where k3d would keep crashing. I downgraded everyone back to 3.3.1 to get teams unblocked while waiting for me to find a fix.
7. Finding a fix usually involves waiting for Docker to prioritize something but at this point I don't trust that Docker know what it is doing.
I am currently pushing for Linux laptops, hosted dev environments and reducing the need to run distributed monoliths. We shall see.
I hope you do get the Linux Laptops through. I just joined s company that made an exception for me to use Linux and I haven't felt more valued ever. I never want to use another OS again.
I think it's unreasonable to expect so much from a company that doesn't make money.
The non-desktop docker product on it's own is crazy good, I think it's reasonable to expect docker desktop to improve once docker actually makes money from it and can afford to hire more engineers to work on it.
If Docker wants to grow up, maybe they could start with replying to support tickets from paying customers. I have a 10 day old open ticket with no reply.
Hah, tell me about it. We were unable to give them more money (buy more seats), and our urgent support request was open for a week. Turns out (from a moment's console snooping) it was a straightforward REST call that was missing a body parameter, so a simple 'curl' fixed the issue for us. But I wonder... how long they were actively hurting their business? And how did a serious bug like that get into production? What does that say about their systems?
Policy success is directly dependent on how we handle requests for exception. Granting exceptions undermines people’s sense of fairness, and sets a precedent precedent that undermines future policy. In environments where exceptions become normalized, leaders often find that issuing writs of exception—for policies they themselves have designed—starts to swallow up much of their time. Organizations spending significant time on exceptions are experiencing exception debt. The escape is to stop working the exceptions, and instead work the policy.
Larson, Will. An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (p. 122). Stripe Press. Kindle Edition.
So, like many companies, successful support consists of yelping at the appropriate public forum, be it Twitter or in this case, HN. Anything the public doesn't see: "due to unexpected call volume, you'll wait at least ten days before hearing from anyone". All the while the company forgets that the complaining customer isn't the only one reading. The rest of us are reading a live account of what company's customer support looks like.
Fwiw, while there probably isn't a _good_ public relations response here ... N=1, when I see a company publicly managing escalation via public shaming, it inclines me to steer purchasing decisions away from them in the future.
I can no longer edit this comment but I just wanted to update that Docker the company has really made huge strides in the last few days to rectify our experience. So if you're having a hard time, reach out. My feeling speaking directly with some Docker people is that they're proud of the company and believe in its future.
"Specifically, small businesses (fewer than 250 employees AND less than $10 million in revenue) may continue to use Docker Desktop with Docker Personal for free. The use of Docker Desktop in large businesses, however, requires a Pro, Team, or Business paid subscription, starting at $5 per user per month."
This comment was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28368997, so it's quoting the corporate press release, not the current article. We've since merged the threads.
Readit News
The business license costs $21/month, probably less in reality.
Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?
Any alternative has switching costs and risks. Companies will just pay this. I see so many people saying “just do these 10 steps and it’s basically the same”. It just ain’t worth it for $250
Another likely outcome is that it’s “easier” for teams to switch to another tool (easier in that at least they’re not waiting on a third party for approval) and everyone loses a lot of time
Big corporations are not the most efficient beasts for this kind of situation
$21 is nothing for a one-time spend.
$21 per month per employee is now $252/year per employee, but now you also need someone managing all of these licenses and accounting. Every new employee or team change requires some juggling of licenses with associated turn-around times before that person can get started.
It's not bad when it's just a couple key pieces of software, but it doesn't take long before every engineer has some mix of 20 different subscription tools and platforms and licenses and you're on the phone with a different vendor every week doing the annual subscription renewal pricing negotiation dance. The sales people know how this works and would prefer to wear you down with endless conference calls until you get tired of negotiating and just pay the new, higher price they're asking.
Soon, all of those "cheap" tools have added up to $1000/month or more per employee with a couple people dedicated to managing these licenses and negotiating with vendors all of the time. And it's terrible.
When the tool isn't easily replaceable, you deal with it. I'm not sure I see that with Docker Desktop, though. When you get a new hire, do you tell them to submit a ticket with licensing and wait until they can get their Docker Desktop license? Or do you simply write some documentation about how to accomplish tasks without using Docker Desktop so you can remove another external dependency? Teams generally gravitate toward the latter.
The concept of opportunity cost is completely lost on a lot of business leaders.
Buying anything on my organization costs something around $10k. Add your price to this to discover the total we are spending.
That's on financial cost. The opportunity cost of stopping technical people to handle the technical details of an acquisition is just huge, and larger the most differentiation there is on the market.
Legal alone will spend months looking at run-of-the-mill software contacts trying to negotiate absurd concessions from vendors in situations where they clearly have no bargaining power.
We can spend a lot of money on Oracle for their profoundly obtuse products though.
I asked if I could just pay it myself, but was told that would violate the IT department guidelines and possibly an SLA too, so I just sat there for a month, reminding everyone at the daily stand ups I was blocked. I couldn’t believe it.
I was not the only one who was tied in red tape there, it was indeed normal.
This company was making 600 million a year in profit.
If the org's been thoughtful to in advance, it's at the level of being almost an operational risk - all of engineering uses this tool, tool's licence or pricing might change, retooling has an associated cost and down-time.
Example: I only have to revisit licensing once a year, to create a new 12 line purchase order. It's still a pain but I prefer purchase orders vs dealing with credit cards. In addition, querying expense history for purchase order lines provides far more detail vs querying a credit card platform. Credit card history tends to go into a black hole.
One possible hitch...Some companies might restrict Accounts Payable from receiving purchase orders for separation-of-duties reasons.
Not sure how would that work for a desktop tool. It's in them to figure that out though
What situation, being trapped? I'm not sure what size has to do with it. Are small corporations maybe more ... agile?
When you've spent enough time in the IT Department, you'll see companies demand that you "cut laptop costs" or similar. Because when you're buying 250 laptops a year, the people with the budgets go "OMG we're spending half a million a year on laptops". So changes are made to the configuration, maybe small SSD but often times it'll be something like less RAM, or slower CPU - because purchasing controls aren't that fine. Great, you've now cut $200 per laptop and the money people are excited to see you've saved $50,000/year.
Do they understand that now there are 250 people, which probably all cost more than $100,000/year, whom aren't quite as efficient as they could be? Nope. And they don't care. The budget says you get X. The personnel cost is attributed in some other category not to be touched.
Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this product. It's not in budget."
Lastly the per-employee cost adds up. It's $11/mo for SSO. $18/mo for email suite. $19/mo for Gitlab. $14/mo for Jira. $5/mo for Confluence. $3/mo just to put SAML on Jira & Confluence. $8/mo for Password vault. $12/mo for Slack. $17/mo fro Zoom. $17/mo for Lucidchart. $12/mo for Laptop MDM. That's not everything an employee needs, heck it doesn't even cover HR products (Workday? 15Five? Applicant Tracking?), Training (probably a couple of those), EDR/AV for laptops, and dozens of other smaller services. Sure adding another $21/mo isn't going to change the number a lot on an individual basis, but it adds up really fast when you multiply it out across all your Developers.
And don't forget. How do you rationalize that your container software costs more than your source code control solution? One of those two things you can very easily live without... and it's Docker.
Let me add something useful here and say that it even has a name:
"subscription fatigue"
I was fine paying Netflix for an all-I-can-watch even if I ended up watching less than a DVDs worth of content just for the convenience of not keeping a stack of DVDs around.
I'm not fine with paying Netflix, HBO, Disney, my cable provider, NRK (state owned broadcastee,mandatory) etc etc a monthly or yearly fee.
So I just drop it: it is not like I need to watch it.
Same with tools: I'm happy to bug my company to pay for IntelliJ as long as NetBeans is stuck in its current spot, we already pay for Jira and Confluence but I am always seeking out the open source solutions, - partially because I'm old enough to realize that $n in subscription means $n x 12 x m devs a year, partially no cost open source (contrary to popular belief here) is less hassle and partially because going proprietary feels like paying Dane geld.
Edit:
> Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this product. It's not in budget."
Probably true in most places and it is sometimes a problem.
But that institutional hesitation is also a powerful defense against every vendor who wants to inject themselves somewhere and then start jacking up the prices.
So it's less about 10$ and more about: "I understand what a wireless mouse is and it doesn't look mission critical to me."
"No idea what those items on that AWS bill mean, but I'll probably be better off not asking"
Of course, that fortune 500 is going to pick up the phone and demand to pay 1/4 of that (and they'll probably get it). Enterprise sales is fun
If it's a core part of my job and the best option available, it'd be worth it, but if there's any reasonable alternative, I'll go download that today instead of wading through all of the lawyers and approvals and compliance to use something slightly better.
If you already have a live deployment then the company's bigger fear is the a risk of switching to a completely new infrastructure and they'll all of a sudden push the paperwork quickly to stay on their existing codebase.
I’d rather investigate an alternative like running it on a VM than deal with that. Actually I’d rather shave my face with some mace in the dark than deal with that.
Tech companies? No, they will probably cough up until they have another solution.
IT departments in non-tech companies? Yes. I fully expect a circus there. Many won't have known it was being used, purchasing will have their ego bruised by a company "hijacking" them and won't want to pay, and so on.
No, it costs $21/user/month.
> Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?
I work for a big enterprise that is currently going through a transition that is simultaneously a cloud transition and a transition to more critically consider tooling with license management overhead (which for a $21/seat license, is probably a significantly larger cost in a big, bureaucratic enterprise than the license cost itself.)
That said, there's a good argument that the things that you get for that $21/seat are things many enterprises will find are still worth the license cost + license management overhead. On the other hand, most of that is stuff that doesn't scale with number of developer seats, so a subscription model that doesn't work on that basis and therefore doesn't impose the kind of license management overhead that per-seat licensing does would probably net Docker more revenue while imposing less total costs on enterprises.
Do you guys not realize that I know that? I did the maths standardized to one seat.
I’m not also suggesting that the entire engineering spend for 100+ person companies is $250k/year.
Do the analysis on a per unit cost because that’s how life works: per unit cost of human capital and per unit cost of software vs. per unit value creation.
Being so cheap actually complicates the matters even more, since the finance people don't really want to mess with purchases less than $5,000, even though it is their own rule that requires all software to go through them regardless of cost. It just means they won't be willing to help very much.
USD 21 per user/month + bulk discount is nothing.
If companies want to roll their own they can, but most won't. Docker Desktop adds a lot of value if only by removing the hassle for quick os-agnostic development.
In a world where podman exists, what's the point of docker on dev machines anyway?
That's not how corporations work.
I work remotely for large corporation (over 100k employees) and it wastes on average an hour of my productivity every day on stupid stuff. For example my office PC becomes unavailable every time it gets an update, at least once a week. They force restart during working hours. If there is somebody in the office I can call them to reboot it, if not I have to drive there. Everybody has the same problem. Meetings are disrupted, plans are thrown in disarray, people are loosing sometimes entire day of work.
The problem has been known before covid and has not been solved.
Any normal logical person would throw resources into solving the problem, but the people responsible just say they are busy and why is that a big problem if you can just press reboot?
Not just "think" - I know for a fact.
Finance refuses to spend money if there is a "free" alternative, and Architecture rejects all software that isn't OSS licensed without a lengthy review process. It would take us at least 3 months to get approvals and POs for all the devs, if it even got approved, but more likely it would be in "batches" of licenses, further delaying roll-out. So instead the devs are beginning to install Linux VMs to run Docker from, or looking at podman.
People forget that just because there's a "rational" decision, doesn't mean people (or businesses) will choose it. Businesses are run by humans, and humans are irrational and dumb. Path of least resistance wins.
The pricing model for this is really stupid. A $21/mo subscription is a pain in the ass — they would be better off just selling it perpetual for $1000.
I ran a big enterprise shop for years. Nuisance licensing like this costs a fortune - I’d need to go do legal review, have it tracked for renewals and compliance, etc. Freemium product like this is always coupled with a stupid license enforcement audit that appears and tries to extort you. For a small quantity, overhead may be more than the product.
As an enterprise consumer, it makes me question the viability of the company. $250 a year is priced to allow unit managers to use P-Cards to avoid procurement processes. It’s too cheap to make meaningful amounts of money, so unless it’s a way to shift me to a more intelligent model, I’d have folks assigned to investigate alternatives.
Salary + Taxes (Payroll, etc) + Fringe (Healthcare, etc) + Dev licenses + Training/conferences = paycheck * (n > 1.5)
If docker and containerization is not yet widely used in the company, a lot of decisionmakers will not buy it, because they did fine without it for decades ;)
VCs are shooting themselves in the foot here: it is very obvious that we should never adopt any technical tool backed by VC, because they will eventually try to make us an offer we can't refuse and then go out of business shortly thereafter when their extortion attempt doesn't work.
Lol yes, I know. My point was the cost of meatware is 3 orders of magnitude greater than the software, and likely less at scale.
$100k/mo would mean 5,000 devs. I highly doubt a company with overheads near/in excess of a billion dollars/year is going to sweat a $1m expense for core infra like Docker.
However, this will have a massive change on the competitive landscape. For companies that haven't yet adopted Docker, this is a huge red checkmark. This change is going to spur development on open source alternatives like nothing else could.
This is such a good problem to have. I would love to cut Docker Inc. a check.
And we've basically moved over to garden (a k8s dev env) anyway. But we still use docker plenty.
Still should be doable for most businesses that size but licensing costs can blow up when you start to have a lot of seats. An annoying thing about the company I work for is that they have a limited number of licenses for things like IDEs, so they ration them. And so I'll boot up an IDE for a language I work in less - like say, PyCharm - and it will stop working because my license got taken away and given to someone else. I'll have to request another one be given back to get working again, which is pretty annoying when I'm trying to get something done. I work mostly with Docker / Kubernetes so if I'm in a situation where my core tools are being constantly taken away, I'll be pretty miffed.
I agree that Docker has every right to charge big companies for this software. Just wanted to point out that the costs can be more than you'd expect.
My company was already somewhat interested in checking out hosted IDEs, and today this pushed us to start some proof of concepts to move some teams over to github's codespaces.
So, yes, businesses will adjust their workflows to avoid the cost since many were already interested in improving their workflows and relieving some of the burden on their developer environment tooling teams.
YES! I've seen it. Stinginess at my shop regularly causes hours and hours of pricey engineering resources to address problems caused by underallocating cloud resources to the point things fail - or refusal to allow some cloud service because it will cost $100/month (despite saving 10s of thousands in eng resources)
It's crazy but I bet it happens many places.
Management may want some badge of honor for saving a budget line item. Or developers may want to embark on a new and interesting project and successfully convince management it's a good idea, who will agree for a wide range of reasons (not pissing off developers might be one of them).
Both will ignore the risk and considerable downsides. Happens all the time.
I have, and let me tell you, they will spend dozens of hours and thousands of dollars to fight a purchase of $21. I'm really not joking.
Hahahahaha, yes, absolutely. Because if the wrong VP gets this in his head, it's not $250/year, it's "almost half a million dollars over 3 years" for the 500 employees or whatever. I've seen it happen.
This was email provided and owned by the very company I worked for, and it was costing enough for management to care.
Maybe enterprises have changed since then, but I wouldn’t be surprised if stuff like this does start asking questions as it’s a new cost on a budget.
But maybe my company is too large; large enough companies can have smaller teams, other teams will probably go the licensing route
1) Internship at a well known tech corporation. I was on a project that would accelerate the debugging and diagnostic of a machine the whole factory depended on; tl;dr I was making an app to replace an overgrown Excel sheet. To do that we used an opensource library but the catch was that the maintainer made its money by placing the documentation under a paywall. At some point the project was going well but the leftovers from Google Code could not do anymore. So it took two months (TWO MONTHS!) to do a $15 USD one time payment with the company's credit card. Apparently the process took longer due to the fact we had to go through PayPal.
2) Another multi billion corporation, less big but still multinational. They spent hours and lots of money on internal propaganda to promote their "core values"; which of course included "agility". We wanted to buy a commercial code analysis tool to save time during code reviews and increase code quality of a code base where ~30 devs worked. No brainier right? We had the R&D department's VP's OK to buy the damn thing and ask for forgiveness to the mother ship later. After 6 months our team leader was still receiving calls and and form to fill. "Do you really need this? Did you think about other products? Did you have the OK from this person thousand of miles away and this other person who speaks in a very broken English?" Using the company's internal organism and salary tables we estimated that during those six months they have wasted about 5 years of licensing in salary.
fuck..i need to find a new job
If you know more than other people, that's great, but then please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. If you can't do that or don't want to, that's fine, but then please don't post.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
It’s ok. Just keep telling yourself you’re smarter than everyone else.
Would love to know how you arrived at this number.
The list price for 100 engineers on the most expensive plan would be $25k/year and I guarantee Docker will do volume discounts.
Additionally, the terms just say you need a paid plan, which presumably could be the cheapo $5/mo plan which would be $6k/year for 100 engineers.
As soon as there is a viable alternative (and I’d be happy to contribute to the effort), I’ll be moving away from Docker for Mac.
For Windows, use WSL2 and do the same.
Both can mount “local” folders, although the setup is obviously different.
You now have a better way to manage containers than ever before.
Multipass, Qemu, and Parallels can all provide a solid VM on Mac host. All you need after that is your dev environment VM guest image to deploy to the team.
https://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/Mac
https://www.parallels.com/
Deleted Comment
Isn't paying their fee also contributing to the effort of what they've put in to it so far, and ideally what they'll do to keep it working and improve over time?
I certainly don't begrudge Docker for trying to create a sustainable business, but as an "open core" model it's really hard to understand what their proprietary extensions are that people will want to pay for. They took a stab at the container orchestration space with Docker Swarm (which you could definitely imagine having an "enterprise version") but that lost out pretty definitively to Kubernetes. So they're left with Docker Hub? That just doesn't seem like it will really be much of a revenue generator. You're either using whatever cloud container registry is available (ECR, GCR etc) or you're using a more general artifact repository like Artifactory, GitHub which can be a container registry as well as a Maven/NPM/etc artifact repository.
I just SSH into my server. The biggest pain about macOS is that it can't easily mount SFTP.
[1]: https://mountainduck.io
Pulling the same projects to my (admittedly quite fast) linux box in the cloud is night and day for speed in docker with volume mounts. Browserfy runs 5x faster, at least. Yarn install is 10x faster.
And it's reliable. Docker's filesharing on the mac has about a 25% failure rate that any given save will be properly picked up by watch, with a complete, uncorrupted, updated file.
It seems to me you would be the one cutting off your nose to spite your face in this scenario.
I understand (in some way) the decision Docker made but I am not sure it is the way-to-go. However, it is a very hard question and if I had to pay a monthly fee for each component I‘m using to develop a solution, one or the other project would not even start because it‘s not worth it anymore.
How does this affect consultants that want to introduce docker to large corporations but small teams? A lot of scenarios become crappy now.
Deleted Comment
Minikube sets up a Linux VM using MacOS Hypervisor.
It even has a convenience command to configure docker-cli/docker-client.
For corporate situations where MITM proxies are used, you can inject/trust custom CAs usinghttps://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/handbook/untrusted_certs/Hyperkit is open source software that works on macOS.
https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/drivers/hyperkit/
Virtualbox is also a free (as in beer, and mostly libre) driver that works on all of windows/linux/macOS
Available options:
Was free for as long as I've known it existed. Telerik recently bought by 'Progress' (ironic), software re-written in Electron and now charges a subscription to use it.
Glad HTTP Toolkit is now available free for 'hobbyist' tasks - https://httptoolkit.tech/
Then everyone panics when a critical build stops working because some apt repository of some decades old distros is unplugged or some shell script piped directly to bash goes dark (or someone with a bit of security common sense rightfully has a panic attack) and we have to salvage it using some ex-employees backup images.
This is also why I just don't say I do devops because it just gets to a point where the "devops guys" are just the people you give the dirty jobs nobody wanna do.
Everything else is handled by other parts of the ecosystem already, image registries both private and public, orchestration, etc.
Good move by Docker, financially speaking. They have little to lose.
A whole bunch of scenarios die now.
A lot of macOS developers imo seem to have more knowledge in their specific domain and less in how to wire up a VM to look seamless, they'll need the docker CLI to work with the local filesystem to keep a lot of existing Makefiles functional, I see a bunch of companies caughing up money in the short term just for that.
Docker Desktop on Windows itself proves quite well that WSL2 works fine for this use case.
Why would I go out of my way to set up Docker differently on my dev machine compared to my servers? That seems like a recipe for failure.
I have been supporting it for 2 years now. Been through all the Docker Desktop upgrades, performance issues everytthing. I have researched docker performance on macs running k3d + k3s + istio and a bunch of microservices. I have had to jump into the internals of Docker daemon and docker cli and networking to solve how docker networks are provisioned for various proxying issues.
1. Docker dragged their feet with native performance for file syncing. We have to selectively enable it and just so that it doesn't bog the machine down.
2. When running it gets the CPU running at 75-80C, causing the fan to run non-stop at 3000 rpm at least. It is definitely impact by bad macbook pro design, which is terrible at airflow and heat sink activities
3. We were on unstable for a bit to test the new file syncing approach. Docker dropped that in stable and said "deal with it"
4. The paid forced upgrade notification means that I can't peg the Docker Desktop version for the whole org at a certain version.
5. Right after we switch from the unstable to stable, the next minor version is a breaking change.
6. Number 4 would be fine it docker would keep to their guarantee of stable being stable. They do a terrible job of being backwards compatible. The current stable we had was 3.3.1. With the constant minor upgrades, and pushing people, some people went to 3.6.0. (the latest as of yesterday, Aug 30) This broke everything inexplicable with just a VM error where k3d would keep crashing. I downgraded everyone back to 3.3.1 to get teams unblocked while waiting for me to find a fix.
7. Finding a fix usually involves waiting for Docker to prioritize something but at this point I don't trust that Docker know what it is doing.
I am currently pushing for Linux laptops, hosted dev environments and reducing the need to run distributed monoliths. We shall see.
The non-desktop docker product on it's own is crazy good, I think it's reasonable to expect docker desktop to improve once docker actually makes money from it and can afford to hire more engineers to work on it.
Larson, Will. An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (p. 122). Stripe Press. Kindle Edition.
EDIT: Wow, they actually did this and got back to me - thank you!
"Specifically, small businesses (fewer than 250 employees AND less than $10 million in revenue) may continue to use Docker Desktop with Docker Personal for free. The use of Docker Desktop in large businesses, however, requires a Pro, Team, or Business paid subscription, starting at $5 per user per month."