
Docker Raises $95M Series D Round for Its Container Platform - carlchenet
http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/14/docker-raises-95m-series-d-round-for-its-container-platform/
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otterley
I don't mean to be overly dismissive or anything, but what does Docker make
that customers will pay for? This is an awful lot of money to throw at a
company that doesn't have a business plan, let alone technology that can't be
readily replicated.

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petercooper
For me it seems to fall into the same sort of setup as Mongo or MySQL in the
long term, and MySQL did alright ($1bn).

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threeseed
I fail to see how they are in any way comparable. MySQL and Mongo both have
made a lot of money selling into the enterprise with the decades old per
server licensing model. Now Mongo is starting to make inroads into the data
warehouse space with their partnerships with Teradata, SAP etc. They aren't
selling a PaaS or web application that will just be used by a development team
here and there.

Docker seems to be much closer to Atlassian. Which could well be their biggest
competitor one day.

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andyidsinga
It seems that Docker could follow a very similar path as MongoDB -- be the
preeminent supporter for docker and supplier for turnkey + validated
solutions. Building an ecosystem of add-ons (closed or open source) around the
core product puts them in an even more central role

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IgorPartola
It seems to me that Docker is heading down the same path as MySQL, whether
knowingly or not. Perhaps they are trying to get everyone on board, then sell
to a BigCo a la Oracle, telling them "here's the whole Docker ecosystem, go
ahead and extract money from it." Who is Docker's actual customer? The user or
BigCo?

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mattmanser
I thought MySQL AB was already extracting money, and lots of it, when it sold?
Like $100 million in revenue?

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csomar
Amazing news. Decided 6 months ago to go with Docker (both in dev and in
production) for a financial application. It was a risk, and I got lots of
resistance from the other devs and the security expert on the project.

Docker is simply amazing. I'm currently using Grunt to manage the
images/containers, but Docker Compose will replace some of that in the future.

That being said, here are what you should expect:

1\. It's not a VM. What work in DEV will not work in PRODUCTION. Be ready for
some nasty debugging.

2\. It's better to use the same OS (e.g. Centos) for both DEV and PRODUCTION.

3\. Image sizes are not really small. Docker is consuming around 4GB of space
for 6 containers.

4\. Sometimes it breaks. I just need to destroy the whole thing and start
clean. But that's _Grunt ReRerun_. And it works nicely.

5\. I can update the code base, data, the applications, the whole OSes
structure with _Grunt ReRun_. Takes a couple minutes.

~~~
vacri
I have similar experiences to what you listed... and it's why I'm going to be
moving away from docker in the mid-future. That 'nasty debugging' consumes a
ton of time. I'm probably going to head back to .debs. I see a place for
docker, but not on my production servers. It consumes gobs of disk space in
practice and requires a lot of hand-holding; an extra layer of stuff to work
around and to debug.

I was resistant to it at first as they'd just started using it in the company
when I arrived, but the devs kept talking about how wow it was. Fast forward
to today, and not a single dev has it installed on their machine. None of them
are interested.

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zwischenzug
Interesting. What do they do now?

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vacri
Generally what they were already doing, as only one or two actually installed
docker in the first place. They use Gulp to manage their dev systems, but I'm
not sure if they use any other tools.

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zwischenzug
Right, so it never really took. My experience is that it doesn't happen by
itself, and needs focus from someone to make it work for you, much like you
can't just install Jenkins and declare CI "done".

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rmoriz
I'm really exited to see which business model will be chosen to get a ROI.
Docker is very popular but since most existing enterprise vendors adopt or
integrate it, I'm not yet convinced that Docker Inc has some unique assets to
make money out of.

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bontoJR
I went to a couple of events where Docker was a topic in Europe, the general
feeling is that the solution looks great, but every single time a
speaker/organizer asks to raise a hand if using it in production, nobody does.
I mean, it's definitely a technology having a momentum, but I still have to
find someone that heavily used it in production.

~~~
otterley
That's because it isn't ready for production yet, and certainly not at scale.
You're in for a world of hurt if you try to deploy hundreds of containers at
once from a central registry. And there's not yet a way to bind containers to
physical interfaces that DHCP themselves at runtime.

Docker solves problems for developers, and soon it might solve problems in
production. But for large deployments, that day is not today.

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piva00
Well, we're currently running 80+ instances in my company using Docker to
deploy every app. I'm the responsible for the push to this Docker-only
approach, given that we had a bunch of legacy apps that were running in Chef-
managed nodes (that I've also implemented), so I don't think that it's a
developers-only tool, it's already pretty mature and I've not yet run into
requiring to bind a container to some physical interface or whatever, the
virtual interface has been great thus far.

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otterley
How large are your images? How long does it take you to fetch them from the
registry?

Binding to a physical interface is required if any of your apps will share
port numbers on a host. If you don't have network ACLs that control traffic
between VLANs, and you have a discovery service to manage rendezvous, then
maybe you can get away without it. But many of us cannot.

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piva00
Our images range from 600MiB to 2GiB in general. When you say share port
numbers what exactly are you referring to? App X listening to port M in eth0
and app Y listening to port M in eth1? We don't really have this use case so
for us it has been pretty simple.

I think that your use case is a lot more complex than ours or I'm
misunderstanding some part, are you using bare metal servers in your own data
center? I'm trying to grasp what's your architecture like so I can see what
parallel can I make to ours.

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otterley
You didn't mention how long deploys take. 2GiB x 80 servers = 160GiB; assuming
a 1Gb/s interface on the repository, it'll take a minimum of 22 minutes for
all the servers to get their new bits.

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curun1r
The nice part about Docker is the images are composed of layers, so you only
have to re-download a layer when it changes. In practice, we pull all of our
base layers when we bake our AMIs, so spinning up a new instance is pretty
quick and each new deploy only has to update the top layer that contains our
code.

Honestly, the only issue when it comes to image size is the initial developer
pull either when they onboard to a team or when they bork their boot2docker
install (which, disturbingly, happens way too often).

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otterley
Many applications are very large (consider a Rails app with all of its
prerequisite Gems). Granted, this isn't Docker's problem, but it presents
practical distribution bandwidth constraints that Docker doesn't currently
solve well.

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viggity

      he told me that the company still hasn’t spent most of its Series B funding yet
    

They raised a $15M Series B that they haven't even burned through, and yet
they've raised a $40M Series C and another $95M D round? That is crazy.

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fweespeech
Docker is either going to find a way to be a major player in the VM/Container
market or its going to crash and burn.

Raising money when the VCs are willing to throw it at you is a good strategy
when you know you'll burn through alot.

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darkarmani
> Raising money when the VCs are willing to throw it at you is a good strategy
> when you know you'll burn through alot.

Yes. Doesn't it also indicate that you are giving a lot of the company up at
the current valuation? ie: you are betting that a (near-term) future valuation
is lower, so you want to lock in the money now.

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dragonwriter
> ie: you are betting that a (near-term) future valuation is lower, so you
> want to lock in the money now.

Or, you know, you think the money now effects the long-term valuation such
that, if the current owners are giving up _x_ proportion of the company in the
proposed round, with _v0_ as the anticipated future value of the company if
the round doesn't happen and _v1_ as the anticipated future value if it does,
the owners think that _v0_ < _v1_ ×(1- _x_ )

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fixxer
OK. I'm calling market top. Love docker, but to date I've given them zero
dollars and do not anticipate that changing. The Microsoft strategy looks
cloudy at best.

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mbrock
For that to be more relevant, you might want to tell us what role you're
speaking as, what you know about Docker's paid services and why you're
uninterested, what other similar services you do pay for, etc.

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fixxer
My role is data scientist for a venture backed marketing startup, but I also
wrote/designed all the tech used for ETL and reporting. I use docker in
production to sandbox models that are called by the client via a web app. I
admin a private registry that is used by other groups at the company.

All of this was free. Setting up a private registry takes about thirty
minutes. Orchestration via ansible is also free.

I'm "calling top" in the most cheeky way possible, so be need to get your back
up. I love docker and use it heavily. It is a brilliant product, but the
brilliance to me is also in the fact that you really don't need much else
beyond the basics. And I realize that they are moving incredibly fast and
there is potential to see something that will blow my mind and cause me to
open my wallet.

If you're an enterprise user coming from Microsoft world, maybe paying for
docker services makes sense. I prefer to just take an hour and do it myself
for the cost of infrastructure.

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bliti
Since Docker is not ready to officially be used in production:

\- Those of you using it in production, how are you handling security?

\- How secure has Docker proven to be in general?

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justincormack
Containers per se do not reduce security. Most of the security issues are
related to other changes, eg if you switch from VMs to Docker you are removing
the VMs that may have been providing security, thats not really a Docker issue
per se. If you run stuff with increased privileges in containers (ie root, or
some capabilities) then you may decrease security too, but your applications
should not be doing this.

You can argue that the docker daemon itself (which is a big monolithic process
running as root) is a security issue (RedHat certainly do). You can also argue
that it makes security processes harder, as you dont have workflows in place
to audit containers, make sure they are updated etc, but thats a different
issue.

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lclarkmichalek
Eeehhh, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Docker containers, as of
1.6, do reduce security. Without user namespaces, container root is system
root, and the number of images that run as container root is incredibly high
(where they might otherwise be running as system non-root). 1.7 should change
this, as we'll finally get user namespaces, though I don't know how many
people will end up using them; let's hope they're on by default, I guess.

~~~
justincormack
But if you run stuff as root you already lost, container or not. Why are so
many people running containers as root? Is it because they are running whole
distros that expect that?

User namespaces are going to be really complicated to work with not really
convinced they are the panacea people expect. Not running as root is much
easier!

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lclarkmichalek
Sure. I'm just saying that running stuff as root is the de-facto standard in
the container world; it isn't outside of the docker ecosystem. Take, for
example, the docker registry image[0]. Runs as root. In what world, other than
the docker world, would that be considered acceptable?

[0] [https://github.com/docker/docker-
registry/blob/0.9.1/Dockerf...](https://github.com/docker/docker-
registry/blob/0.9.1/Dockerfile)

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nickleefly
I dont think people will put private application docker file on hub even with
paid plan

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sudobash
Please explain to me the value of these articles, I understand that hacker
news is run by capital venturous but I still feel that we got minimal value
from just ogling at the absurd amount of money that the startups are getting.

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pbreit
Docker is a YC graduate so it makes sense for there to be extra interest here.

