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Comment by rubiquity | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Docker newbie but, don't private registries go against the spirit of Docker and basically every infrastructure automation tool created in last 5 years? I can't even see enterprisey companies finding this useful because their IT policies are so strict that having config on someone else's servers, private or not, is against their wonky rules.

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First, in the real world private registries are used for builds containing source, sensitive keys, and so forth. There is a use case here.

But second, no enterprisey company will use a service that bills like this, because

-$4 and $250 per month all rounds down to zero, so it's not a selling point

-$4 signals no support when the shit inevitably hits the fan

-$4 signals this company will tank along with your data in a month

An enterprise company with actual money will take an hour or two of dev time to boot up one of the open source registries (https://github.com/dotcloud/docker-registry) and stay in control.

Source: working at a Docker startup for almost a year

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I've worked with organizations where it would be impossible to get a $5 DigitalOcean box, while, at the same time, a $1,000 subscription for something would not be an issue. Enterprise companies would rather pay you a hundred times what you think is a reasonable price, if it can save them time.

Ya, that is another thing to factor in. The hourly cost of a fully loaded salaried employee is as much a cost as paying for a given service is. ;)

I assure you I'm serious. You might be interested in reading patio11's essays on this. He says if far better that I can.

I assure you we've debated this a lot before putting out that pricing. There is a way to do this and do this well. For us pricing docker hosting competitively is the best way to do it, especially for a startup ecosystem that is only just beginning to wake up to the potential of docker-based testing and deployment.

He is quite serious.

If you are interested in the corporate market, you probably will want to offer a special 'Enterprise' pricing plan that includes 'Enterprise-y' features at a higher price point [e.g. $249 / 250 repository minimum]

We will. But we won't be offering an enterprise plan while we're in beta :)

Sure we're sending a signal that we're not ready for enterprise folks. I can be candid in saying that we'd rather be the digital ocean of dockers than an AWS. at this point :p

Not really - much like private repos on github don't go against the spirit of github's public repos. The kind folks at Docker, Inc. the company behind this fantastic technology, themselves recently announced a commercial private registry service too. They kinda beat us to it ;)

This is just a part of XaaS infrastructure and XaaS is widely used. Git hosting (e.g. GitHub), file hosting (e.g. S3), VM or container "hosting" (e.g. Heroku), mails... Why can't Docker images couldn't be hosted in the cloud ?

It's not using the "cloud" that I was curious about. I thought Docker images were supposed to be shared. OP's comment fairly addresses that.

There are still a whole bunch of companies who aren't on the bandwagon of putting their code up on the Internet. In fact, there are a whole bunch of companies who likely cannot due this due to various regulations and contracts with their clients.

I'd also add that closed and open source often feed into each other in a kind of symbiotic relationship. Sounds controversial to the libertarians and hard-core open source folks but that's the way it usually plays out.

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