Docker Hub Registry is down (opens in new tab)

I wish I knew this 2 years ago, going to have to migrate to something that isn’t down every month.

Being paranoid helps. My pipelines never pull images from the hub, I always store those locally.

> Does anyone know anything behind the economics behind this?

You use VC money and run at a loss while focusing on marketing and tech evangelism, getting more and more startups and hopefully established companies using your software. As the cracks begin to show those growing organizations have too much tied to your system and they can't afford outages and need to scale. So they pay you for the Enterprise version of your software where you actually fix all of flaws present in the community version.

Look at MongoDB if you need a good case study. It was incredibly hyped from about 2009-2015, people would defend it in heated online arguments, and today it's rarely considered for greenfield projects. But they're making about $100M/qtr selling subscriptions to Enterprise & Atlas servicing the technical debt established during that hype cycle.

Likely the traditional model of taking a large amount of VC money, putting it in a pile, and then setting it on fire and waiting until they stop adding more, at which point the company ends.

yeah there's a variety of "free at point of use" services driving the Internet and, sooner or later it seems likely there will need to be a change in how they're funded.

It's not just Docker hub, there's services like the various Programming language package repos (npm, rubygems etc) and the Linux distro package repos.

I would have had Github in that category, but now it's owned by MS, presumably they don't have many of that kind of funding problems...

1) You can run your own pull-through cache[0]

2) You can use a different registry

3) Run something like kraken[1] so machines can share already-downloaded images with eachother

4) If you need an emergency response, you can docker save[2] an image on a box that has it cached and manually distribute it/load it into other boxes

0: https://docs.docker.com/registry/recipes/mirror/

1: https://github.com/uber/kraken

2: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/save/

Have the ability to build containers on demand from source as well as host your own repo.

Maintaining your own registry as a cache.

pull-through mirror with tons of disk

Whenever one of our essential 3rd party services go down, I can only shrug and hope they figure it out quickly. They provide a good service and nobody has 100% uptime. Still better than solving it internally, which is even more likely to have downtime.

Partial failure is just fact of life. If this is a major issue for your process, it might be better to try and find ways to alter your process so this isn't an issue. Alternatively, mirror locally.

No, you should rewrite your CI not to depend on external stuff, if you want sane evenings.

If you are getting paid to do CI you are simply doing it wrong.

Rule #1 Host your own stuff, never rely on others.

Rule #2 automate everything