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.
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.
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!
I second Podman. I’ve been using it recently and find it to be pretty good!
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…
So does this setup like a one-node kubernetes cluster on your local machine or something? I didn’t know that was possible.
Basically yes. Rancher Desktop sets up K3s in a VM and gives you a kubectl, docker and a few other binaries preconfigured to talk to that VM. K3s is just a lightweight all-in-one Kubernetes distro that’s relatively easy to set up (of course, you still have to learn Kubernetes so it’s not really easy, just skips the cluster setup).
Thanks for the info. For others curious, here’s a decent short intro to K3s.
Now I’m kind of wondering if this is light enough for integration tests.
Wait…y’all were paying for Docker?
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.
This is the correct response.
At my job we’ve been asked to remove Docker desktop unless it is absolutely necessary for a client project.
I’ve just been using Docker through command line via WSL and that’s good enough for me.
I don’t see any use for Docker Desktop, you can see the running containers in a gui instead of just typing docker ps in a terminal, damn what a fucking awesome and needed thing, it’s gonna totally come in handy when I do deployments through the terminal and I didn’t learn the commands
I think docker desktop’s bigger value prop is that it’s a well supported zero-effort setup of a VM to run the docker daemon on platforms that don’t support it natively (i.e. MacOS which a lot of programmers use). And it very cleanly handles mounting your local filesystem into containers running in the VM, which is important for dev envs and used to be a source of friction with alternatives (although it seems like the competition has caught up and this also now works out of the box with rancher desktop and others?). Having a GUI is somewhere behind those, though I know folks who have a weird preference for GUIs 🤷‍♀️.
I’m just a guy who uses Linux and spends most of his time in a terminal, so I’m not saying I value docker desktop, and I personally don’t have to deal with any of this so I’m probably behind on how good the alternatives are. Just saying where I see other people get use out of it.
We use it, and I honestly don’t see much value. I use 90% CLI, but occasionally it’s nice. I use macOS at work, so it’s nice to be able to see how much space the VM is using. Also, searching through logs is a little nicer through the GUI than the CLI.
I actively avoid the GUI at home because, even on Linux, it’ll spin up a VM to host your containers, whereas if you stick with the CLI, there’s no VM, which solves soooo many headaches.
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.
Support. If your a business, you pay to keep uptime high. This is unnecessary for most people.
If you’re a business and need uptime you shouldn’t be using Docker Desktop in the first place
Yes, in the sense that if you are a free user or unauthenticated and pull too often (including checking if a tag exists) you will get rate limited and have to wait or pay.
