[deadbunny]

The biggest issue containers have at the moment is data, while there are a few "solutions" none of them make much sense when containers are meant to be scheduled for high availability, shifting hosts with ease packing things nice and tight.

Containers make sense for applications or processing but if you have to tie a database to a host you lose a lot of the container benefits IMHO.

Config management tools will be around for a while, if nothing else you need to configure those docker hosts.

[jamesblonde]

Agreed. I like to use Chef Solo, orchestrated by Karamel, to spin up stateful services (like databases, Hadoop, etc).

I think the big win if we get there will be using Docker to provide images and portability, chef (or puppet) for configuration, and something like Karamel to orchestrate and provide concise cluster definitions with GitHub as the artifact server.