Docker Desktop no longer free for some businesses

Hello, cloud gurus! I'm Nigel Poulton, and this is your monthly update on what’s new with Kubernetes. In this post, we’ll dive into the new Docker subscription plans that have a lot of people confused. Plus, I’ll share with you my picks for the top 3 Kubernetes announcements from the past month.

Want to know more? Read on!

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Docker Desktop is massively used by organizations all over the world, but Docker Desktop is no longer free if y ou’re a large business.

We'll define "large" in a second. But I think the most important thing is if you’re a personal user, if you’re in education, or a small business, then nothing changes. It’s still free for you.

But if you are a large business? Yes, things are changing.

Basically, if you employ over 250 people, and you’re doing over $10 million USD a year in revenue, Docker thinks you're big and you need to start paying. And I’ll be honest, I wholeheartedly agree with them.

I mean, Docker Desktop is a slick product and people are getting value from it every day, so it’s only right they should pay. If everyone just keeps using it for free, eventually, it won’t be there — and none of us want that. In fact, I’m a big believer that a healthy Docker is good for just about all of us.

Anyways, if you do fall into that big business bucket, you’ve got a choice of three plans: Pro, Team, or Business.

Docker Desktop Pro accounts start at $5 per month per user, Team accounts start at $7, and Business accounts start at $21.

Docker Business is a new subscription category, and it’s aimed at organizations that want a little more control over their Docker development environments. With that, you’ll get a centralized control plane, and the ability to control things like which registries your developers use, which images and versions, better control over security, and a bunch more.

So yeah, if you’re small or in education, you can keep using Docker for free under the Docker Personal plan. But if you’re big, do the right thing and start paying.

OK, so No. 1 in my picks from the previous month is the announcement of EKS Anywhere.

Amazon are bringing their popular Elastic Kubernetes Service to on-prem data centers. And I guess if you’re an existing EKS user and you’ve got your own data centers, it maybe makes sense to consolidate your Kubernetes management plane onto EKS — because that’s effectively what you’ll get. I think, as the name suggests, it’ll be like EKS, just in your own data center.

So the same deployment model and tooling. Plus, a single console to view your cloud-based and on-prem EKS clusters.

And I suppose even if you’re not an existing EKS user, but maybe you’re evaluating distros (so to speak), well, the fact that you can now have the EKS experience and tooling on-prem and in the cloud, that might make EKS more appealing to you. And that’s obviously what Amazon are wanting here.

Right, No. 2 in this month’s roundup: Version 1.0 of the NGINX Ingress controller for Kubernetes.

Ingress in general has made some big moves in recent versions of Kubernetes. Well, this time the popular NGINX Ingress controller that finally goes 1.0, or GA. And it’s a big step in a couple of areas.

First, it shows commitment from the project, and we like to see that. But it’s also a breaking change.

It only works with Kubernetes 1.19 and higher. And it demands the v1 API within the networking.k8s.io API sub-group. So no more v1beta1.

You gotta be on a recent version of Kubernetes, and you need to update the API version stuff in your manifests.

And there’s a bunch more to it than that, but you can follow this link for another link out to the migration docs, and they’re definitely worth a read if you’re planning to use it.

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Last, but by no means least, security company Snyk just raised a tidy $300 million USD in a series F round, taking their valuation to a whopping — wait for it — $8.5 billion dollars. That’s billion with a B.

So congratulations to the team at Snyk. The market’s obviously loving how they’re giving developers ownership of security, and making it simple. And I know I’ve said it a lot before, but organizations aren’t messing about with security these days, so neither should you. And tools and partners like Snyk are really pushing the needle.

That’s it for this month’s edition of Kubernetes this month. Stay safe, and I’ll see you all again next month — same Kube time, same Kube place.

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• Watch: Kubernetes + Azure, the HashiCorp way

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