
Mirantis acquires Docker Enterprise and Docker raises $35M - chuhnk
https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/13/mirantis-acquires-docker-enterprise/
======
AaronFriel
Docker is the single best thing to happen to software deployment in 20 years,
not just because of what it did for eliminating "works on my machine" build
problems, but because of what it enabled. A _huge_ ecosystem has sprung up
around containerization, with immense value created for other businesses.
Their "Docker for Windows/Mac" apps are one of the first things I install on
any new dev machine.

It's unfortunate they didn't figure out a way to make money off the best thing
to happen to building and deploying software in 20 years.

A lot of other people did, from the startups now selling value-adds to
Kubernetes like Kong and Tigera and TwistLock (since acquired) and others, to
the public clouds which all offer Docker-based build services, image
registries, and PaaS deployment tooling, to Kubernetes itself which for most
users today still relies on Docker.

~~~
sagichmal
> Docker is the single best thing to happen to software deployment in 20 years

Something like Docker may eventually hold this title, but Docker itself?
Certainly not. It was simply too poorly executed, both strategically but
especially technically.

Running production workloads in Docker containers was, is, and will be
remembered as nothing short of professional negligence. Often expedient,
sometimes worth the risk, but always a liability.

~~~
gerbilly
Yeah, totally agree. Most uses of Docker are of the "Junk Drawer" variety.

A bunch of disorganized unpinned dependencies get thrown into a container that
will work in a reproducible manner only until one of the upstream deps
changes.

This approach also allows people to get away with deploying an app without
truly understanding it. That's always been a good recipe for success.

Another poster claimed that it's mainstream practise, so what? So was running
your web-server on 90s era IIS. Not that that was good idea either.

~~~
senderista
The biggest issue I've had with Docker is that Dockerfiles aren't designed to
be reproducible, so regressions are practically guaranteed. If there were
tooling around pinning versions of Linux distro packages, and maybe a few
select PL package managers like Go, Node, Python, Ruby, it would make a huge
difference. I tried to do this by hand and finally gave up.

~~~
manigandham
You can stack layers (where you install exactly what you want) and create an
image that is deterministic.

Even if you install from repos in the dockerfile, they should have version
numbers.

------
lacker
This seems like an embarassing error in communications for Docker! I wonder
what's going on behind the scenes.

There is one positive message for Docker coming out today, which is that they
raised $35 million dollars. Yeah, they didn't announce the valuation, so it is
probably a down round, but still, getting $35 million dollars to work on your
core business is a good thing.

However, the first announcement that TechCrunch wrote about didn't include
that at all!

Check out the timeline here. At 8:45 a.m. TechCrunch publishes the first
article, about selling off the Docker Enterprise line. Then at 9:21 a.m.
TechCrunch publishes a second article -
[https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/13/mirantis-acquires-
docker-e...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/13/mirantis-acquires-docker-
enterprise/) \- with two really large pieces of news. Both that Docker raised
the $35 million, _and_ they replaced their CEO for the second time since May.

TechCrunch says: _for reasons only known to Docker’s communications team, we
weren’t told about this beforehand_. It seems like they only learned the full
news after publishing the original article, and quickly wrote a followup in
the next half hour.

What's going on at Docker to be this confused in the message to the press?
Chaos around the leadership change? Close to running out of money and they
only raised the round at the last moment? Were they going to sell off the open
source component to someone else, but that fell through? Or, boringly, maybe
they just thought they clicked "send" on an email that they didn't. I'll keep
imagining there's an exciting reason though.

~~~
partisancat
maybe signals it wasn't a done deal or similar? but still, I agree that none
of this makes sense. why not just sell off all the bits? like you, wondering
if that fell through.

sad end to a once tech darling.

Has anyone secured rights for the book yet?

~~~
lacker
Well, it's not an end yet. That $35 million isn't nothing! That's why it's a
shame that this was messaged so weirdly, a lot of people are going to skim
this news and conclude that Docker went out of business.

Plus, open source Docker is a really nice tool. Even if the company tanks, I
hope somehow the open source community manages to keep it going, because it
would be a shame if the Docker parts of peoples' infrastructure just decayed
over time.

~~~
dang
Ok, we've added $35M to the title above.

------
zapita
This makes much more sense if you think of Docker as two distinct companies
that were awkwardly sharing the same name and corporate entity, and are now
being separated.

One makes developer tools, has a huge developer brand and community. It does
not generate revenue except for Docker Hub which probably barely pays for
itself.

The other sells enterprise products competing directly with Red Hat and
Vmware, and indirectly with the big cloud providers. It generates meaningful
revenue, but probably flat growth, which considering the huge amounts of VC
money invested, makes it a failed business.

The investors probably decided that 1) Docker developer tools and brand still
have potential, but 2) the enterprise business failed to deliver, so 3) they
are jettisoning the latter and recapitalizing the former- essentially starting
over.

~~~
rhacker
Docker hub probably makes no money. We pay monthly for it, but could easily
switch to AWS ECR at this point with a cheaper monthly price. The Hub is nice
in that it essentially has unlimited storage, but I suspect this might be an
internal struggle for the company. We have no reason to go in and clean up 2
year old images that are 1GB each. We generate images on each commit - trying
to do as much as DIFF reductions as possible, but if we change package.json -
boom, puppeteer + all over again. And that's quite often.

~~~
mprovost
But if they're using a deduplicating storage backend, they can shrink down the
actual storage on disk across all customers to something quite reasonable.

~~~
dharmab
That only works if Dockerfiles are layered in such a way to maximize caching
(many are not and naively pack many changes into a single layer). Yes there
are block-level dedupes but that's a transparent feature of most storage
systems and not a competitive distinguisher of Hub vs ECR/ACR/Quay.

~~~
grosswait
I believe the person you replied to was commenting on the advantages to
Docker, not the customer, and how (blocklevel is what I inferred) dedupe makes
the quantity digestible to Docker's pocketbook.

------
ravivyas
> Update: for reasons only known to Docker’s communications team, we weren’t
> told about this beforehand, but the company also today announced that it has
> raised a $35 million funding round from Benchmark. This doesn’t change the
> overall gist of the story below, but it does highlight the company’s new
> direction.

This is weird

Edit: Link of announcement : [http://www.globenewswire.com/news-
release/2019/11/13/1946551...](http://www.globenewswire.com/news-
release/2019/11/13/1946551/0/en/Docker-Restructures-and-Secures-35-Million-to-
Advance-Developer-Workflows-for-Modern-Applications.html)

Excerpt: AN FRANCISCO, Calif., Nov. 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Docker today
announced it has successfully completed a recapitalization of its equity to
position it for future growth, and has secured $35 million in new financing
from previous investors Benchmark Capital and Insight Partners. The investment
will be used to advance developers’ workflows when building, sharing and
running modern applications.

~~~
ravivyas
Can someone explain what is "recapitalization of its equity"

~~~
rolltiide
It means they were broke af and in a death spiral because nobody wanted to buy
any shares of docker at any worthwhile price, so instead, they created a ton
of more shares and sold those and now the organization has capital to do
things that makes value for all shareholders

~~~
syedkarim
For clarity: Since a ton more shares have been issued, the previous
shareholders own much, much less of the company than they once did.

~~~
rolltiide
and for clarity, this doesn't get them out of the death spiral it is a key
part of the concept! but maybe they generate value with their second wind

------
talawahtech
I kinda wish Microsoft would just acquire the rest of the company and be done
with it. It fits in very well with their Developers, Developers, Developers,
Developers focus. Especially in the era of Open Source friendly MS.

VSCode, GutHub and Docker. Three peas in a pod.

~~~
tracker1
While I think CNCF/Linux Foundations would be a better fit, I do agree that
the rest should probably come under a more protective umbrella. Given the many
options, MS is probably one of the better ones. Definitely wouldn't want to
see Oracle step in, and while I appreciate RedHat they are much slower moving
(since IBM's acquisition, and I'm not sure if for the better).

~~~
coredog64
My theory at work is that this is arbitrage. Docker wouldn’t sell to Oracle.
So instead, Mirantis buys the Enterprise side and in 6 months will sell to
Oracle. At which point everyone who has ever looked sideways at a Docker
download will be subject to an Oracle licensing audit...

------
deanmoriarty
Something makes me feel that today a lot of hard working employees lost all
their stock options, or their hard earned cash if they previously exercised
them... Mirantis can't possibly have paid multiple billions for that, which
means all common stockholders were likely wiped out as part of this "fire
sale" (pure speculation on my side).

~~~
nemo44x
Probably, yes. Unless they turn it around in a big way and IPO one day, your
typical rank and file is probably out of luck here.

The good news is they have a lot of engineering talent so if you’re a hiring
manager then now is a good time to begin directing your recruiters to poach
aggressively from there.

------
raesene9
This seems like a bit of an unusual move at first glance, hopefully more
details will come out about Docker's plans.

From this article it sounds like Docker are keeping Desktop and Docker hub,
neither of which make a lot of money (I'd have thought?), so not sure what
their plans are to develop those, but you'd think that without the enterprise
product line, they'd perhaps need to start monetising Docker Hub more...

~~~
cloudytoday
Docker Hub does make money with paying for private repo plans but not sure how
much that is and how many people are in the "newly restructured" Docker org

~~~
gtirloni
Unless they are downsizing to 10-20 people, I don't see how that generates
enough revenue to keep the lights on.

It's weird. Assuming Docker Enterprise was keeping the lights on, why would
you sell your cash cow? Maybe the price was too good to turn down. But now
Docker Inc finds itself in the same shoes as other companies trying to
monetize open source without a platform.

If this means we'll get to pay for Docker on the desktop AND it'll get
improvements, I'm all for it. But it's a tough situation nowadays (nobody
expects to pay for most developer tools).

~~~
zapita
Reading between the lines, it's pretty obvious that the enterprise business
did NOT generate enough revenue to keep the lights on.

~~~
gtirloni
And what does exactly?

~~~
zapita
Funding from investors betting on the future value of a business built on the
huge user base of Docker’s free products.

------
tnolet
Sad to see this happen, but honestly their SaaS products (Docker Cloud, Docker
hub etc.) were absolutely terrible.

The UI and UX felt like some half assed intern rush job.

Terrible bugs around things like login and teams that just never got fixed.

As if no one really cared.

------
chuhnk
Can anyone explain what this means for the future of Docker the company?

~~~
streetcat1
Yes. Docker the company is gone. It is hollowed out. Docker Enterprise will
morph into mirantis Kubernetes offering as added features.

Probably the rest of the company will turn into some sort of Kubernetes
desktop dev tool.

------
z92
This news comes at a time when I discovered that Fedora 31, the latest
release, doesn't support Docker anymore.

~~~
geerlingguy
To give more background, it supports Podman[1], which behaves the same as
Docker in many ways. But the support situation changed with Fedora 31 because
of CgroupsV2[2]; however, that doesn't mean Docker CE _won't_ ever run on
Fedora 31. Follow this GitHub issue[3] for progress

[1] [https://podman.io](https://podman.io)

[2]
[https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/CGroupsV2](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/CGroupsV2)

[3] [https://github.com/docker/for-
linux/issues/665](https://github.com/docker/for-linux/issues/665)

------
fortytw2
...the Docker CLI is part of the sale?

What exactly does that leave Docker the company with?

~~~
fcantournet
the desktop experience and the docker hub apparently a.k.a : the good bits
imo.

~~~
fortytw2
Oh, the macOS app? I've never used that or the Windows app, do you still use
the CLI to control them?

Docker Hub is kinda worrying for me, as GitHub, Gitlab, GCP, Heroku, and AWS
all offer container registries now (and Quay is open source)

~~~
AaronFriel
The MacOS and Windows App automate the process of running Docker on a non-
Linux OS. It sets up a virtual machine, volume mounts, port forwarding, and so
on, and the Docker CLI then allows you to just "docker run" an image and have
navigation to "[http://localhost:3000"](http://localhost:3000") just work.

Recently the app gained the ability to run a Kubernetes cluster as well, which
makes spinning one up on a machine quite a lot easier to evaluate those
workflows.

------
tiuPapa
Not really sure what got acquired here? Are they just taking the docker
enterprise business? How can they acquire Docker CLI? Isn't it opensource?

~~~
skrebbel
They can acquire the team that's primarily building it. If they stay on board
and they keep focused on docker CLI, then that's effectively the acquisition
of an open source project

~~~
johannes1234321
And they can take the copyright and the brand and the domain name and ....

------
hnmullany
LinkedIN profiles that mention Docker

Mar 2015: 14,000

Mar 2016: 50,000

Dec 2017: 178,000

Nov 2019: 534,000

Still going up!

------
GordonS
I've never even heard of Mirantis - curious to know if I'm alone in this, or
if they're better known by others on HN?

------
thresh
Finally they found someone to get sold to. Only 750 customers, so low.

And no info on the price.

~~~
zapita
750 customers for an enterprise business is quite high. They are not counting
Docker Hub customers which are probably in the tens of thousands.

------
harikb
Can we please not show yet another container ship every time there is a new
about Docker? I get it - all news articles need an image. But imagine being a
non-tech person trying to follow news and wonders...

------
laminarflow
Are there any particularly detailed/good anthologies out there about the
founding/fate of Docker after Google opensourced Kubernetes?

------
levesque
Don't Docker Enterprise and Docker Desktop share code and expertise? Isn't
this a loss for both of those projects?

------
mister_hn
It buffles me that software-wonder Docker raises so few money compared to
unicorns like WeWork or some SF Startup.

------
shshhdhs
I wonder why the investors weren't concerned. They've replaced their CEO for
the second time since May.

------
Pirate-of-SV
Does anyone have a background story of Mirantis? Where's the money coming
from?

~~~
szczepano
[https://www.mirantis.com/company/investors/](https://www.mirantis.com/company/investors/)

------
techntoke
When is Docker going to add the basic functionality to see if a container
image is out of date from the registry, without having to re-pull the image?

------
hlesesne
Who keeps Docker hub?

~~~
zapita
Docker.

------
gramakri
> Mirantis will keep the Docker Enterprise brand alive, though, which will
> surely not create any confusion.

Is this in jest?

~~~
raesene9
I took that line to be sarcasm.

~~~
gramakri
I thought it was quite funny that they snuck in that line in the middle of a
serious news article.

------
baron816
Is it just me, or does it seem that New York tech companies are really
struggling?

~~~
akulkarni
Docker is headquartered in SF:

[https://www.docker.com/company/contact](https://www.docker.com/company/contact)

We’re actually in the middle of a tech renaissance in NYC, especially for
software infra: eg Datadog, MongoDB.

~~~
baron816
My bad. I think I got it mixed up with Digital Ocean. Still, WeWork,
StackExchange...MongoDB isn’t particularly loved anymore.

