VMware learned their lesson from OpenStack, where emerging upstream technology threatened their virtualization monopoly. They also were forced to go in this direction by their enterprise customers, who are very dependent themselves on open source technology.
One of the opportunities at VMware is monetize the open source investment more effectively, especially Kubernetes. I still don't totally understand how they plan to do that but wish them (you) all well.
Given the situation of Docker, it doesn’t look good for the monetization of Kubernetes, or am I missing something (I‘m not too familiar with Kubernetes)?
Given how pluggable k8s is, it should not surprise you that there are companies at every integration point. Tigera for network policy. Security policy vendors using admission controllers to secure clusters. Linkerd/Istio for service mesh. Storage vendors. Etc. Each integration point provides a hook for someone to do better than the default behavior and charge for it.
The ecosystem is thriving and because the k8s platform was built to be pluggable; it is an actual platform. Docker (the company) tried to monopolize and monetize when they built Swarm, and that’s why they lost the cluster orchestrator space IMO. Docker (the tool) is just a tool, not really something you can monetize easily. Docker (the image format) is where most of the value lives, there isn’t much value to extract there as it’s an open protocol.
Docker (the tool) was commoditized by k8s, and now there isn’t really any way to charge for a differentiated implementation. Providing a registry and a best-in-class Docker for Desktop experience isn’t going to be a huge TAM.
> Given how pluggable k8s is, it should not surprise you that there are companies at every integration point.
Of course, this is pretty much what ended up destroying OpenStack outside a few niches. HP OpenStack that only worked with 3PAR SANs was a great example - every finger in the OpenStack pie was trying to push OpenStack to have corners that they could monopolise and tie to their proprietary products.
The lack of monetization was mostly on Docker itself as far as I can tell. For example, they could have offered secure container supply chains years ago. Instead, companies like JFrog got there first. Public cloud container repos are another example. Amazon and others got there first with products like ECS.
Docker didn't really attempt to monetize Kubernetes at all until the writing was on the wall, instead they had their own thing (Swarm) that they were pushing but most of the ecosystem went in the other direction.
There's stuff like Openshift and Rancher as commercial Kubernetes distributions as well as a lot of Kubernetes "addons" like weave, portworx, etc. Monetisation of Kubernetes is totally possible.
Docker failed because they tried to compete with Kubernetes, lost and then didn't have a clue how to find a niche where they could enrich the Kubernetes ecosystem.
One of the opportunities at VMware is monetize the open source investment more effectively, especially Kubernetes. I still don't totally understand how they plan to do that but wish them (you) all well.
Disclaimer: Former employee of VMware