Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxfurman | Hacker News Reader

I think you are underestimating the power of a name brand. Docker is synonymous with containers to a lot of people, and if they want to pay for container support they'll pay Docker. Similar to, as other commenters have said, people pay Red Hat just so they can have someone to complain to when there's a problem.

View on HN

This. I've been working in Government recently, it's all containers and it's all Docker.

If anything I'm surprised that their valuation isn't higher.

Are they paying Docker (the company) for anything? Or just using containers as a part of a wider software infrastructure?

I've been using Docker since early 2014 and they haven't gotten a dime from me. If you count the storage and bandwidth on the public registry I've cost them money.

Is any employee of Docker, inc. critical to your use of containers? Is any copyrighted, non-OSS Docker, inc. code critical to your operations?

Where does the money go.

It doesn't cost money to use the docker format. Why would they get a high valuation from no revenue?

I just checked - I had no idea that Red Hat had a market cap of 17.8BN right now. I'd assumed it was about 10% of that.

I wonder where Marc Fleury [0] is these days. He sold JBoss to RedHat for a cool $350m back in the day.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Fleury

Container format brand? I bet Dell/HP/et al thought they had a datacenter advantage with their brands over whitebox, but we've seen how that has worked out.

What you described is a services/support company, something Red Hat has worked really really hard not to be over the years (to debatable degree of success). Being their for support vs OSS is not how you get great margins.

Anyway, at this level of the stack in prod settings brand won't take you that far.

Companies buy support from RedHat openshift or Pivotal CloudFoundry to run containers. They never pay Docker Inc.

> They never pay Docker Inc.

That's simply not true. Having a support team they can call is, rightly or wrongly, a large part of the reason some companies consider buying Docker Enterprise Edition at all.

Having a support team they can call is a large part of why they pay RedHat or Pivotal for docker.

The problem is that Docker is effectively an OS-level facility that platform vendors have already integrated into their stacks to prevent that from happening. If you use Docker and want support for production instances, you still pay Red Hat (or Microsoft, or AWS, or Google Cloud), because RHEL, Windows Server, GKE etc. include Docker containerization. I genuinely don't understand why you would try to load Docker Enterprise on top of an OS and rely on two different vendors working together.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com