[joshpadnick]

This article seems to be arguing that Docker’s primary downfall was being hostile to its open source community. Without having an opinion on whether that’s true, I suspect the core issue was not that but their business model and execution.

Before Kubernetes was the dominant container tech, they were pushing Swarm but I remember being confused about where Docker “standalone” stopped and where Swarm began. Perhaps it would have been better as a separate tool with a more clear open core model?

Then there was Docker Hub, whose UI was never great and which always seemed light on features.

I don’t recall seeing any kind of container introspection tool from them for a while either, despite others coming out.

Meanwhile, they represented a threat to the cloud providers if you could truly run anything in a container on any cloud. But the cloud providers all neutralized that threat by the classic “commoditizing the complement” strategy where the Docker cluster and registry tech were all either open source or commoditized.

Once Kubernetes emerged as the winner and de-valued Swarm while the cloud providers all offered their own Kubernetes and Docker registry offerings, I’m not sure how much more profit there was for Docker to claim.

Honestly, startups are hard. Sometimes really hard. It’s hard to know if a different team would have gotten different results in this space.

[brutus1213]

Totally agree with your first paragraph. Regarding execution, I'm not sure what Docker could have done differently that did not lead to the outcome we have today. I don't think that playing nice with other opensource devs would have made a difference (as the article claims).

Also .. the K was hardened at Google is BS. The ideas, maybe. But I am quite skeptical about the amount of prod internal google code went into early K (pls don't point at the Borg paper .. I'm talking about actual working code). I recall doing a deep comparison of swarm vs K circa 2015 and Swarm was clearly superior in both design and implementation. Today, K is better and has an ecosystem .. maybe the issue isn't that core Docker containers played nice with opensource .. rather .. swarm should have focused much more on playing well with others.

One point of contrast is Hashicorp .. they are in the workload orchestration and mgmt space and seem to be doing really well. Kudos to them!

[smarterclayton]

Kubernetes (from open sourcing to about 1.3 or 1.4) is a second system mostly written by senior engineers (from several companies) with deep experience in the problem domain and strong architectural guidance, and a willingness to stop at “just good enough” and then let stuff mature. Kube was mostly “done” from a design perspective in early 2015.

Swarm was 2-3 people in the early days, without as much strong opinionation about what exactly they were building, which meant while it was a tighter, simpler system, it couldn’t evolve as easily.

I’m obviously biased - I was the first non googler to have commit on the repo. But it’s much easier to build something when you know upfront exactly what it looks like and you have a set of committed and experienced engineers with good leadership.

[SPascareli13]

> I’m obviously biased - I was the first non googler to have commit on the repo.

How well was your PR received?

[forgot-my-pw]

Looks to be successful in general: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pulls?q=is%3Apr+aut...

[Dowwie]

I fail to see how an alleged threat of universal cloud platform compatibility was neutralized by commoditizing the services you mentioned.

[peteradio]

At least Docker is not going to benefit anymore right?