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Bocker: Docker implemented in around 100 lines of Bash (2015)

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398 points emersonrsantos | 3 comments | 23 Nov 24 23:18 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mschuster91 ◴[24 Nov 24 00:42 UTC] No.42225102[source]▶
The fact how simple it is to re-implement a large part of Docker because all it fundamentally is a bit of glue code to the kernel is the biggest problem Docker-the-company faced and still faces.

Where Docker adds real value is not (just) Docker Hub but Docker for Windows and Mac. The integrations offer a vastly superior experience than messing around with VirtualBox and Vagrant by hand (been there, done that) to achieve running Docker on one's development machine.

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dilyevsky ◴[24 Nov 24 01:57 UTC] No.42225397[source]▶
Nah, they should have prioritized building some sort of PaaS solution like CloudRun, Render or Fly so they can sell that to enterprises for $$$. Instead they did half-baked docker swarm which never really worked reliably and then lost ground to k8s rapidly
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smt88 ◴[24 Nov 24 03:27 UTC] No.42225720[source]▶
Docker was a spinoff of an internal tool used to build exactly the type of PaaS you're describing. It was like a better Heroku and I loved it, but they shut it down when they focused on commercializing Docker itself.
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1. dilyevsky ◴[24 Nov 24 23:20 UTC] No.42231481{3}[source]▶
That was always weird to me they opted for freemium cli instead of enterprise paas play. Maybe it was just too early
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2. smt88 ◴[25 Nov 24 02:41 UTC] No.42232730[source]▶
My guess is the margins were really bad for a PaaS. It's expensive to build on top of other people's clouds.
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3. mst ◴[25 Nov 24 15:34 UTC] No.42237099[source]▶
There's also the issue that building an effective enterprise sales organisation is a whole Thing and if you believe you can achieve profitability via a different path then the temptation to file the enterprise approach under "I have no idea how to do this and also I would rather not" is probably pretty strong.

(this is in no way a comment about what the right decision would have been, only musing on an additional reason the decision might have gone the way it did)