Docker October 2022 Pricing Change FAQ(docker.com) |
Docker October 2022 Pricing Change FAQ(docker.com) |
I hate that this has become an acceptable way to list prices. It's not $24 per month, it's $288 per year! "Per month" implies the customer can pay that price every month, and also stop paying on any given month.
In other news, Docker Business is going to cost 3.3¢ per user per hour. Except you're required to pay for the hours you're asleep, because the service is offered "on an annual basis".
> The list price of the Docker Team subscription will go up by $2 monthly / $24 annually, to $11 per user per month or $108 per user per year. (Annual subscribers will continue to save $24 yearly per user.)
> The list price of the Docker Business subscription will go up by $36, to $288 per user per year.
Note that Docker's pricing page also emphasizes the per-month cost of their annual plans, so this isn't some change they made for the blog post.
[0] https://sso.tax/
I really don't get at whom this SSO-tax hate is directed at?
The SSO Wall of Shame
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31175300
(106 points, 41 comments)
As it stands Docker seems to have burnt a lot of open source good will, and now people are left choosing between a failed unicorn desperate to monetize or a Red Hat knockoff designed to get you into RHEL. Docker is such a huge ecosystem of tools rolled into one that it's bound to live on forever, but the magic is gone.
There are other alternatives, like Amazon's Firecracker
We want more money, so we're charging more money.
The dust is settling and people are starting to realize that Kubernetes is too complex for a lot of cases. This is where things like acorn.io try to live, but this all feels like trying to get back to the same experience Swarm had.
150 users * 12 months * $7/month = $12,600
150 users * 12 months * $24/month = $43,000
Is that right? There are customers who will see their bills more than 3x?
I think this will just lead to more companies switching to alternatives like Podman Desktop or Rancher Desktop.
But to make us feel better, they're offering a 30% discount (for this initial year) to the affected companies.
This is insane, I don't expect we'll renew out subscription next year. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice...
[0] https://github.com/abiosoft/colima/
[1] https://www.arthurkoziel.com/replacing-docker-desktop-for-ma...
At this point, even not signing into Docker Hub is perfectly passable, because none of my CI servers ever hit the rate limits, since Nexus can act as a caching proxy, or I can just put my own images in it. It surprises me that this isn't the de-facto way of doing things, since currently it seems like Docker Hub has to deal with a needlessly large amount of network traffic and also countless dead/abandoned images stored in it (and thus, wasted $$$).
I also use a pretty simple setup of Gitea and Drone CI for building my images from a Git repo, which works rather nicely, but perhaps that's besides the point (though you can read more about it on my blog). Of course, I won't say that building most/all of your own container images is necessarily something that you should always do.
That said, personally, I decided to focus on Ubuntu as a common base image for my own needs and install software that I need (Node, Python, JDK, .NET, Ruby and so on) inside of it through apt, as well as install updates during build time. This lead to my own container images with common tools across the board, common shared layers (e.g. fewer layers to pull if a similar image is already on the server/locally), albeit with fewer space optimizations and some caveats, about which you can read in another article of mine: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-base-fo...
Overall, it's been a pretty reasonable experience, though I also understand why folks whose time is 10x more valuable than mine might prefer to throw money at someone, or go for images that have a bit more vendor dark magic in them (e.g. installing JDK through apt vs doing so in alternative ways that save on space).
As for Docker Desktop, if you want something like it, Rancher Desktop aims to be a passable alternative, though with a slightly different focus: https://rancherdesktop.io/
Personally, I don't think that they'll quite succeed anytime soon, because they have a long road ahead of them, much like Podman did (and still has, for some workloads), but it's definitely a promising alternative, given what else the corporation behind it has been capable of (Rancher, RKE and K3s come to mind).
podman/skopeo/buildah exist free of charge and run containers rootlessly. theres even a podman-compose tool to migrate from existing compose orchestration.
what does a docker subscription get you? the online service? why is this better than just a $250 vps with 12 cores, 48g of ram, and a TB of storage at some place like Ramnode or Vultr?
This is inflation: price increase while still getting the same.
I'd say that it's good for some scenarios.
It's not an entirely complete Docker alternative, there still being various inconsistencies, especially when there are projects like Docker Compose (which has Podman Compose under development) and even Docker Swarm (for which there is no direct alternative), or when something like Nomad support for Podman is still relatively new: https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/plugins/drivers/podman
Even then, what functionality you expect will differ for various folks, so it's going to be an instance: "But it works on my servers (for my workload and my deployments), therefore it's stable!"
Personally, I tolerate the worse architecture of Docker, just because it's widespread, reasonably stable (CLI/API wise) and I can use the same setup for both building and running containers (and even lightweight orchestration). Others might disagree, but at the end of the day use whatever works for you.
Edit: edited the post to clear up the confusion, mistakenly compared Podman with containerd, this probably threw me off: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/kubernetes-workloads-podman-... and https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/compose-kubernetes-podman (it's still not an equivalent to containerd, simply can run workloads described in Kubernetes YAML)
That said, you could probably check out Podman Desktop as well, if interested: https://podman-desktop.io/
In general, though, I have to agree it's a nice alternative. In fact, I think it's already a better alternative for developer workstations. Getting it installed on my Windows box was just one winget command, then I was able to start the WSL host instance and get going with containers from the command line straight away. It didn't install any heavyweight UI front end, it doesn't automagically start running a bunch of services when you boot, there's no nag screens to log in or register or update, you just type some stuff on the command line and off you go. And it makes me happy that even when you SSH in to the WSL instance there's still no daemon running, you're logged in as a normal user and don't need root. It just feels like a much cleaner and more modern approach to containerizing stuff for developers.
The other way to view it is, by withholding a nonessential feature, Docker gets big customers to subsidize all the little guys, and their product is more accessible overall.
If you want a product to succeed without natural growth, get an an auditor to require it.
It’s selling your soul and those being audited will hate you, but it’s very lucrative.
Sounds like it’s worth the cost then.
"I would have paid you if you gave me X for free" is the biggest lie.
[1] https://podman.io/releases/2022/05/09/podman-release-v4.1.0....
Podman is designed to be a developer focused drop-in replacement for docker to use on one's workstation.
It's not possible to use it as a Kubernetes container runtime, there is no CRI for it to work. You can however run Kubernetes style "pods" locally from a pod manifest without a kube-apiserver which is pretty neat.
Most of the original points stand, except that Podman can run workloads described as Kubernetes YAML (or essentially compete with Rancher Desktop thanks to Podman Desktop), but isn't a runtime for Kubernetes like containerd.
Yes, you act like this is a bad thing. You hold back and charge for the features customers want enough to pay for. You’ve never noticed that whenever there’s a Free/Pro of an app the one feature you need is always on the Pro version?
> add enough value on enterprise plan, they could easily drop SSO
That really isn’t how it works. You find some small set of features that enterprises must have like SSO, auditing, and compliance and charge them out the ass for it. This is where the real money for every B2B SaaS comes from and subsidizes the low cost tiers which they hope will translate to an enterprise sale when you ask for it at work.
I’m a bit curious why we don’t see more price segmentation happening with the SSO feature set included, presumably most of these SaaS are seat-limited by plan anyway. If I had to guess, they just don’t want to deal with the headache of tons of small SSO implementations clogging up their support resources.
Okay, look. There's two universes here. Universe A is where split up the features of our product into tiers based on "value" -- some arbitrary groups based on how useful we think each feature is, how expensive they are, how long they took to develop, estimated person-hours saved, whatever. Sweet, it feels right. Now the free/low cost tiers are genuinely less useful than the higher tiers. Pay more for more. SSO probably still lives at the mid or enterprise tier for no other reason that it's a PITA, is the cause of like 20% of support requests, and our SSO vendor charges us per month per SSO connection.
Universe B is where the free/low cost tiers have every feature except for specifically the features and increased usage limits that get SMBs and Enterprise to pay us.
Both on the sales side and the user side I want to live in Universe B.
There is no magic universe where "just increase your value proposition to Enterprise customers" -- it's the same product just carved up differently and non-enterprise customers lose in Universe A.
Even if you could easily afford the salmonella-free eggs, the mere fact that they are willing to sell salmonella eggs at all says a lot about how many shits they give about food safety.
SSO isn't a premium or differentiator feature, it's table stakes.
Not for B2C, hobby projects, very small businesses. That's why it's great as a differentiator: because it separates the wheat from the chaff. And is often non-trivial as the number of integrations grows. Hence the SSO middleware market.
OpenID and OIDC would beg to differ.