Why are people moving away from Docker?

Docker is still widely used, especially for local development. In production, many teams now prefer Kubernetes-native runtimes and alternative desktop tooling.

Reasons include Docker Desktop licensing for larger organizations, security preferences, and operational standardization around runtimes like containerd and CRI-O. In many environments, teams keep using containers and switch to different container interfaces and runtimes.

Containers are still central. What keeps changing is the tooling teams use to build, run, and orchestrate them.