
Docker Expands Relationship with Microsoft - fortran77
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/27/docker-expands-relationship-with-microsoft-to-ease-developer-experience-across-platforms/
======
cocktailpeanuts
Next up: Microsoft acquires Docker.

That will make Microsoft own:

\- #1 Code repository: Github

\- #1 Package management repository: NPM

\- One of the most popular editors: VSCode

\- THE container engine: Docker

I have nothing against this btw, but just wonder at which point the government
will throw the antitrust card

~~~
tarkin2
What's Microsoft's strategy? The AppGet saga has made me cynical.

Start selling Microsoft products to the bought userbases? But I suspect
Microsoft is targeting companies rather than the developers themselves.
Cynically, the drug dealer strategy? Get your (big, slow to change) customers
dependent on the free stuff and then jack up the price?

Or bundle free software in a development environment to attract SMEs and open
source developers. Then integrate and promote Microsoft's own propitiatory
development offerings? Convert open source developers into Microsoft
developers by owning the open source developers' tools of choice?

The tools will be maintained well. And also they'll integrate incredibly well
with Microsoft's own software[1]. And with more Microsoft developers that
means more Microsoft software sold to companies.

[1] Kotlin is a good example of this. Kotlin was integrated so well into
Android Studio. I just pressed one button and, bang, kotlin. I never went back
to Java.

~~~
m12k
My best guess: Expand the clientele of Azure from 'corporations and C# shops'
to 'everybody and their grandma' like AWS has done - basically going after the
long tail of cloud hosting. And I think, apart from improving Azure itself,
they're also trying to do this by making sure the best possible developer
experience is via Microsoft's developer infrastructure, so they get every
chance to 'upsell' and integrate seamlessly in the tools you're already using.
At the same time, they're trying to make cross platform development (via
Xamarin and WSL) the most convenient way to target other OS's, so they're
still in on the action when iOS, Android and Linux webservers are involved.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> basically going after the long tail of cloud hosting.

I want to really stress that your thesis is on point, but it's not about cloud
hosting per se. If software is eating the world, and everyone is going to have
some level of proficiency as a dev, Microsoft is targeting being the digital
operating system of the economy. You write and run your business on Microsoft,
whether you're a Fortune 500 or 5 people working out of a coworking space, and
you can even get email, team chat, office apps, workflow automation tools, and
everything else under the MS umbrella if that's what your business needs.

~~~
danielscrubs
Developers, developers, developers!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaVTHG-
Ev4k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaVTHG-Ev4k)

I don't know if I should be happy about Microsoft going away from the Not
Invented Here-mindset or sad that the best companies get owned by the biggest
companies.

------
atonse
What happened to docker? They basically democratized this whole container
thing and launched a paradigm shift in deployment. But you never hear from
them anymore except when mentioning the command line container launcher.

Or am I missing something here? Is there an interesting business story there
of the missteps made?

Just to clarify, I run docker every day (docker for mac)... my question is
more how much of the industry revenue they are able to capture as a business.
I wouldn't ask this if they were just an open source project with no business
ambitions.

~~~
narrationbox
The short answer is that selling developer tools is hard. Software engineers
especially do not like to pay for stuff. We used to be in the DevOps space [0]
and it is something that requires heavy enterprise sales to monetise well.
There are few companies that truly took off in selling digital shovels, one
example is probably Jetbrains. Most developer tooling/platform companies
either died or got acquihired once they run out of funding. Flynn and Deis
were both acquired and I suspect even the new generation of PaaS like Vercel
would have to look for alternate sources of revenue once the VC funding dries
up and if they do not achieve profitability. The container space is extremely
challenging if you are competing directly with companies like Google with
tremendous amount of cash and a willingness to buy developer mindshare. Docker
may have popularised containers and singlehandedly brought the ideas of BSD
jails mainstream but profiting from it is another thing entirely (you can do
pretty well consulting on Kubernetes etc. but that would hardly give unicorn
levels of return).

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23254394](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23254394)

~~~
kyawzazaw
Why is JetBrains a rare success compared to others?

~~~
thrower123
Mostly because they are really, really good, and they don't ask much for it.

I think I pay them less than $150 for a yearly subscription to their entire
toolset, which is a price point that makes it stupid not to buy them.
ReSharper is well worth a cup of coffee a week, by itself, and then there is
DataGrip, WebStorm, IntelliJ, profilers, decompilers, and other stuff thrown
in.

~~~
yakz
I also enjoy their universal subscription but I recommend trying Rider if you
like ReSharper. Outside of small solutions, I find that ReSharper requires
more patience than I can muster. The type-and-wait is significantly worse than
I remember from classic Mac all-in-ones from the early/mid 90s.

~~~
tracker1
Type and wait is literally the main reason I do most of my actual work in VS
Code now instead of Visual Studio... I can't stand the full vs experience...
code is just nicer imo.

------
cutchin
This makes a lot of sense to me.

Most of Docker's products are being superseded by other tools in the
linux/enterprise world (buildah, podman, kubernets, etc), but the one area I
think Docker still provides actual value to the industry is their Windows
Docker distribution. I'm a developer running linux on a team filled with
Windows users, and the fact that we can all share dockerfiles is a big
benefit. Without docker there's a good chance I'd have to switch to windows or
just find a new job.

Strange as it seems, I think the industry is moving such that soon enough most
actual Docker users will be on Windows anyways. So why not just embrace that?

~~~
sparrc
Though AWS ECS is run on docker and will be for the foreseeable future.

~~~
oldsj
Actually ECS Fargate 1.4.0 just switched to Containerd!

“Containerd is replacing Docker as the container runtime”

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/aws-fargate-
launches...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/aws-fargate-launches-
platform-version-1-4/)

~~~
sparrc
true, I should have specified "ECS on EC2", that will not likely be changing
anytime soon.

------
megavolcano
Been using the new WSL2 integration with Docker since it became GA yesterday,
ditched my VMWare setup and loving it so far.

~~~
agustif
For me on WSL2 keeps crashing on boot.

God knows why, I just reset it to fabric defaults everytime and open VSCode
and hope it works, lol!

------
oefrha
Title: Docker expands relationship with Microsoft to _ease developer
experience across platforms_.

Content: Docker expands relationship with Microsoft to offer tighter Azure
integration (that's my understanding from a skim of the article).

Not sure how that eases developer experience across platforms, especially for
developers who don't use Azure.

I was hoping for better Docker experience on macOS and Windows — since we're
talking about Microsoft here, at least Windows.

Somewhat related: GitHub Actions doesn't support Docker container actions on
macOS and Windows environments, which sucks.

~~~
freeone3000
Docker for Windows is at parity for Docker for Linux, so I don't know what
improvement you'd like.

------
justicezyx
It was rumored Msft wanted to acquire Docker for 3-5b, but was turned down by
docker. It was understandable after they enjoyed the overnight success (there
is rarely a better example than docker when talking about overnight success).

In the end, they underestimate how complex is the market and how limited is
their expertise. Retrospectively, Diane Green's move to sell VMware, actually
more likely gave the firm a long shelf life, in contrary to Docker.

In my leisure time, I started ab article why docker is destined to fail as an
independent entity, but sorry no time for writing while incubating a start-
up...

[https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/sources-
microsoft-t...](https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/sources-microsoft-
tried-to-buy-docker-for-4b/2016/06/)

------
didip
Honestly, Microsoft should just buy Docker and ends Docker misery forever.

And Microsoft seems to be the best fit when comparing to AWS or Google as
potential acquirer.

------
jmspring
Let’s not forget Microsoft also bought Deis. That helped shift the Azure
container service from Mesos to Kubernetes. They also hired Brendan Burns.

Docker democratized the creation of containers, but other companies built more
and better services on top of that.

------
yndoendo
I actually ditched Docker on Windows with the tight entanglement with Hyper-V.
I need access to multiple VM environments and Hyper-V locks you down
preventing usage of VMWare and VirtualBox. Moved to docker in Linux VM.

~~~
aeyes
VirtualBox and VMWare support running alongside Hyper-V:

[https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog-6.0](https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog-6.0)

[https://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2020/01/vmware-
workstat...](https://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2020/01/vmware-workstation-
tech-preview-20h1.html)

~~~
yrro
... slowly :)

~~~
lukevp
Could you clarify what you mean by slowly? The execution speed of the VM? Or
the speed at which they're adopting execution on top of Hyper-V?

I haven't noticed any performance issues with Hyper-V (when Hyper-V is
enabled, even the Windows OS is running within Hyper-V). Does something with
the Windows Hypervisor Platform that is used to support other VM hosts running
on top of Hyper-V introduce some type of performance hit?

~~~
jsmith45
Honestly I think the biggest issues are:

Unlike hyper-V itself, where some VM exits that return to the host are
implemented (for speed reasons) in kernel drivers using undocumented APIs, the
supported Windows Hypervisor Platform API is 100% userspace. (Unless this has
changed since the last time i looked into this, which was admittedly a fair
while back.)

That means that literally every time an instruction is run that needs custom
software backing, you not only get the VM-Exit to the hypervisor and then the
VM Enter back to the Host (DOM-0) kernel, but also a kernel mode to user mode
transition. Then you may well need to query some things in order to know how
to handle them which may incur more round trips to the windows kernel.

That all is bad enough that virtualbox wrote a kernel driver that makes
undocumented calls from in kernel mode in order to handle certain operations
fast enough to be tolerable when doing things like running Windows 95.

The virtualization software is limited to supporting any scenarios that
Microsoft decided to support, driven mostly by the needs of the Hyper-V
experience. Windows Hypervisor Platform users do not get to directly set the
vm control values, so any values in them that Microsoft does not offer some
API to set are limited to whatever values Microsoft chose for Hyper-V.

This can make certain things literally impossible, or require really nasty
work around that have significant performance impact.

Certain simple VM exit scenarios will get handled directly by the Hypervisor
without involving the host OS. If the default behavior is not good enough,
there _might_ be an option provided to handle them by re-entering the host OS,
but obviously that is much slower.

------
fourstar
Anyone here using k8s locally for development? I use it in production, but
docker locally. I'd like to actually just remove the Docker dependency if
possible.

~~~
freedomben
I quit using k8s locally for development once I discovered that podman can run
the same Pod YAML as k8s. That basically replaced docker and docker-compose
for me. I just have a thin bash script that launches postgres and redis for me
for dependencies. If the app has a lot of deps then I might consider local k8s
again, but until then I'm quite happy.

------
tracker1
What's funny, is before they were bought out by Samsung, Joyent had a _REALLY_
smooth interaction and deployment model for Docker.

------
thrower123
Maybe Docker will actually work decently on Windows.

Although I'm going to scream if it just gets jammed into Hyper-V.

~~~
tracker1
WSL2 uses Hyper-V and Docker with WSL2 integration has been exceedingly nice
imho.

------
dzonga
docker seems to be dying slowly. another great piece of technology most people
are not aware of, that are looking for a docker alternative is LXC. the ui
feels clunky at times. but the containers work & are persistent.

~~~
rtempaccount1
LXC takes quite a different approach to containerization compared to Docker
(e.g. running full systems in containers by default, instead of a single
application process)

What is it about their approach that you feel is superior?

------
dr_robert
Oh no i love Docker

