> The problem here is simple; it only provides this immense value if it is effectively free without discrimination. But of course, it can't really just be free, or at least Dockerhub certainly can't be.
This is a self inflicted wound. They placed themselves there but never though about the costs of running a free service with PBs of traffic.
> On the other hand, it also provides immense value to enterprise and even smaller customers, too, clearly
And they should had taken money from enterprise from the day 1 for Hub services.
Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but then I learned about Docker "eco-system" (especially things like Watchtower) the traffic costs was one of the first things what I though about.
would enterprizes have paid for dockerhub from day1? it's very unlikely.
also they are in a tough spot, because if they limit the download of the most popular images, they limit their own basic usability, and those images happen to be almost all free super-fungible stuff (alpine, ubuntu, node, redis, postgresql, nginx, apache, and all the hundreds and thousands of common stuff FOSS stuff)
tying downloads to clients requires some development, requires setting up rate-limiting, etc.
I think what they ended up doing is not a terrible outcome (require login above a certain number of pulls, plus - I imagine - they require login if an IP address pulls too much anyway), but they can't really charge too much, because setting up a caching proxy is kind of trivial.
> would enterprizes have paid for dockerhub from day1? it's very unlikely.
For their private 'hubs'? Pretty likely. The usual SaaS stuff. "You can run it at home, with bells and whistles, but you can just pay us...". Add in some corporate mumbo jumbo about auditing, logging, archiving et cetera, et cetera.
> also they are in a tough spot, because if they limit the download of the most popular images
They did it eventually, though from the other end.
> and those images happen to be almost all free super-fungible stuff
Yep, this is what eventually became their success story - providing a service everyone uses without even thinking about it.
> tying downloads to clients requires some development, requires setting up rate-limiting, etc.
Aaand this is exactly what they did.
> because setting up a caching proxy is kind of trivial.
It's the question of convenience. Anyone can spin-up a private registry (pulling from https://hub.docker.com/_/registry/, heh) but it's PITA to configure, maintain, care. Setting up a caching proxy.. Probably can be done, but again, this requires the resources, both hardware and very software.
This is a self inflicted wound. They placed themselves there but never though about the costs of running a free service with PBs of traffic.
> On the other hand, it also provides immense value to enterprise and even smaller customers, too, clearly
And they should had taken money from enterprise from the day 1 for Hub services.
Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but then I learned about Docker "eco-system" (especially things like Watchtower) the traffic costs was one of the first things what I though about.