It seems like Docker is in a really awkward place as a company. Their strategy was clearly to get everyone on the container hyper train then monetize by selling the production orchestration / runtime. But Kubernetes happened and GCP / AWS have rolled out competition in all the other supporting system needed; container registries, build pipelines, etc. What is the actual pitch for Docker EE now? Their marketing is pushing hard on 'security', but otherwise it seems like they are just selling a pretty UI for K8s. I don't see that being enough to support a company that has taken 250M in funding.

The k8s community is moving full steam ahead toward replacing docker containers with OCI-compliant cri-o/podman. Docker had a good run with a great idea, but it doesn’t make sense to leave all of this vendor-agnostic tooling reliant on Docker (the company).

What about a docker-compose alternative?

https://github.com/kubernetes/kompose

or

https://github.com/helm/helm

or keep using docker's dev client, it can target a locally running k8s now.