Running containers across cloud providers is a pain at this moment. Different providers have their own ways of running the containers through their CaaS offerings. Many providers don’t support scaling to zero. Pricing is based on multiple parameters and most of the time same compute on a CaaS offering cost 3-4 times of the VM with similar specs.
Many (small) startups are not interested in kubernetes because of its complexity and number of people required to manage it. So the need of the hour for such startups is a simple CaaS offering with simple pricing and ability to scale to zero at a minimum. Cloudflare recently released the ability to run the containers in the production environment. However it seems to me that docker has a good opportunity here to make an impact considering the fact that most the developers are using docker in their development environments for containerized applications.
Creators of MongoDB has made it very simple to run it across a number of hyperscalers through the Atlas offering and IMO docker can build a similar offering making it possible to run containers in a unified manner across a number of cloud providers. This is not possible at this moment unless one is using self managed k8s which as I mentioned earlier is not the first priority for small startups.
Do I understand you correctly that you would like to run containers in production using Docker Swarm and you would like to have a service provided by Docker Inc to run containers where you can scale to 0?
Your post would be a perfect feature request in the roadmap on GitHub
As I see, Docker focuses on development environments and features on Docker Hub to build and store images. Also tools to support these. Docker Enterprise was bought by Mirantis years ago, so when it comes to container orchestration for enterprises, you probably want to check out what they can offer.
Your feature requiest in the roadmap could still be valuable as you could let Docker Inc know it is something people miss and who knows what they do later.
Interesting question. Why do you think a software company should turn into a container hosting company? It’s a completely different business and business model.
Trying to find an anology. Why don’t car companies build toll highways?
Many startups are looking for a simple serverless CaaS offering where a developer need not to manage underlying infra (e.g. VM) or a container orchestration engine (e.g. docker, k8s etc). It is all about simplifying the developer experience which, IMO, is being done by only cloudflare at this moment. I have looked into serverless CaaS offerings from fly.io, AWS, Azure, GCP and many other providers but there are one or more issues which makes these offering not user friendly for developers and small startups.
It should be as simple as providing an image, compute specification and environment variables and the CaaS offering should run the containers without developers breaking their head into complex pricing, egress charges etc.
It is more about orchestration than providing IaaS services. One has to simply create docker hosts with lightning speed and destroy these when there are no requests. This is very simple explanation and it may be quite complex to achieve in practice. However, given the fact that team docker has expertise to run docker containers at scale and solve this kind of problems, this should NOT be a big problem for them IMO.
Would you like to have it only for development used by developers without enough resources on there machine or should it be something that you could share with a client? I think anything that helps development has a bigger chance to happen.
They already have Docker Build Cloud and Docker Hub. Microsoft was a software company too and they have Azure.