Docker, CoreOS, and the entire ecosystem are moving really fast, it is a bit hard for me as a developer to keep up. For some projects we are creating containers with Docker and will need to get some things into production as soon as Docker 1.0 is declared stable.
At the same time I want to switch to CoreOS, I also want to wait just a little while for blogs, tutorials, and tools to catch up to where CoreOS and Docker are at, and be usable in production by people who are not professional devops.
The most exciting thing for me in this post is CoreOS CloudInit. It seems to be one of those tools that a small shop could use. It looks a bit like the yaml for fig, but is something that could be used in production as well. At the moment, I have been trying to solve everything a bit on my own with Makefiles, which include Makefiles for custom variables and Makefiles for commands that can be run against each container. It is working great for dev, but I could never really see how to run the containers in prod. The Makefiles didn't really seem like a prod solution, but CoreOS CloudInit looks like it could work.
We also skipped boot2docker and use vagrant with ssh, so seeing that there is a Vagrant box which will run just like an EC2 box is pretty exciting. I would be excited if Digital Ocean would start supporting CoreOS too.
> Quite a few people would like CoreOS on Digital Ocean
I'm one of those, and currently trying to figure out a hacky workaround to make it possible.
I'm already doing this[1] to get a current Ubuntu kernel running on DO. The same principle would seem to apply: boot into the CoreOS kernel, but with an initrd that mounts a different btrfs subvolume than the "bootstrap" OS.
This would require DigitalOcean to have a btrfs-formatted image, though, because they don't offer any re-partitioning support... maybe having the initrd mount a loopback image containing a btrfs filesystem would work?
I'm getting to the point, though, where it might be less effort to just start my own CoreOS-centered hosting service than to continue with DO...
I looked at this, and had the impression you can contact support at DO and they'll mount a rescue mode image where you could setup btrfs manually. The idea of having to depend on support to just boot an arbitrary image didn't really appeal to me though, so I wound up just using Linode and creating the root filesystems from their Finnix image, which worked fine.
At the same time I want to switch to CoreOS, I also want to wait just a little while for blogs, tutorials, and tools to catch up to where CoreOS and Docker are at, and be usable in production by people who are not professional devops.
The most exciting thing for me in this post is CoreOS CloudInit. It seems to be one of those tools that a small shop could use. It looks a bit like the yaml for fig, but is something that could be used in production as well. At the moment, I have been trying to solve everything a bit on my own with Makefiles, which include Makefiles for custom variables and Makefiles for commands that can be run against each container. It is working great for dev, but I could never really see how to run the containers in prod. The Makefiles didn't really seem like a prod solution, but CoreOS CloudInit looks like it could work.
We also skipped boot2docker and use vagrant with ssh, so seeing that there is a Vagrant box which will run just like an EC2 box is pretty exciting. I would be excited if Digital Ocean would start supporting CoreOS too.
[edit] Quite a few people would like CoreOS on Digital Ocean - http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea...