Seems like it's more valuable and ubiquitous than mongo db, and their valuations exceed 1.5B

Ubiquitous does not equal value. Docker doesn’t do anything you can’t do with lxc tooling and an object store (registry). That’s the benefit: containers are free, the orchestration is free, and the registry tooling is free and easily replicated.

Mongo equally so (JSON in PostgreSQL). These valuations are fantasy.

Building a scalable service on top of that is not free, nor easy :)

You're spending those scaling dollars regardless (developers with devops knowledge, infrastructure/SRE folks). Better to spend it on competent staff than a company lighting VC money on fire, no?

> Better to spend it on competent staff than a company lighting VC money on fire, no?

False dichotomy though. You either acknowledge that getting a vendor to do that for you also implies competent staff or you acknowledge that hiring "competent staff" is not like flipping a switch and requires training, ramp-up time, few wrong hires, getting managers to guide the teams, etc

I'm not sure which way is better, but I don't think the industry has decided either :)

i think it's a bit more complicated than that. very skilled developers that know this tech won't jump ship to many borderline broke startups which could easily just get started with docker with less than 'rockstar' devs

It's already a billion dollar company.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/docker-has-raised-92-milli...

That's the point of parent and the article: It has a billion dollar valuation, but they doubt it can back that up with actual revenue and profits.

Of course not, a product company like docker is built for acquisition.

I can think of a few companies that might want to buy Docker. I can think of no company that would buy it at a billion dollar valuation.

Microsoft's containerization strategy heavily depends on Docker (they've got a licensing deal so that Windows server can use Docker EE for free) they might well pay good money to by Docker

Didn't IBM just buy Red Hat for $34 Billion? Can you imagine a future where Amazon acquires Docker to optimize it to run on AWS and perhaps perform a bit worse on GCP. Any small advantage you could get in the space would equate to large changes with as ubiquitous Docker is and as large as AWS is.

Perhaps but given AWS is a heavy Xen and KVM shop something like Kata Containers might suit them better.

I can think of a few companies that may pay an absurd vaulation for Docker; IBM and Microsoft.