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Docker announced updates to their product subscription tiers on August 31st 2021, and with it introduced a significant change to the subscription service agreement for Docker Desktop - essentially making it no longer a free product for commercial use.
The grace period for complying with this change was set at January 31st 2022, and has since been extended to February 14th 2022 for NearForm, while Docker dealt with the backlog of license issuing requests.
As such, we need to take the necessary steps to ensure that NearForm remains in compliance with this service agreement change.
Docker Desktop is currently the market leading developer tool for building and running containerised applications locally; and provides a variety of tooling, integrations, and security enhancements to maximise the developer experience.
With the move a paid tier as part of the subscription service agreement changes, we need to determine whether or not the capabilities provided by Docker Desktop are a worthwhile investment.
How might we provide NearFormers with a premium development environment, while complying with the required license agreements and maintaining the developer experience?
The main benefit of using Docker Desktop for Mac is the setting of the Docker context and seamless management of the underlying virtual machine.
If your running Linux - this ☝🏻 is not a concern for you 😃 .
The solutions listed below assume that you are running Mac OS on Apple Silicon (arm64). If you’re on Intel, minikube with hyperkit is another viable option.
podman is another tool to keep an eye on as a docker replacement with virtual machine management, and is under active development by Red Hat - however it does not seem a have the maturity to justify recommendation at the moment. For example, podman does not yet support making local files available inside the podman virtual machine.
“I’m a Docker CLI user with little/no need or previous usage of Docker Desktop GUI and integrated tooling for Kubernetes. I prefer the command line, and use minikube or kind for Kubernetes.” → Colima
“I want to go straight to running a Kubernetes cluster on my machine, complete with container management and a nice GUI.” → Rancher Desktop