[axelfontaine]

First of all thank you for evaluating our work. As I clearly stated in my post above, Boxfuse isn't intended as a general purpose replacement for Packer. If your usage falls within the usecases I highlighted it can be a very good fit though.

As for the notion of "immutable" servers, this industry term means servers that aren't updated in place, not servers without a read-write file system or read-write memory.

In the case of service discovery with client-side load balancing you can easily integrate client libs for services like Eureka or Zookeeper directly in your JVM application, or you can ship an agent (like Consul for example) and run that. You have a minimal Linux x64 system after all.

And no you don't have to pay $100/month. The licensing is based on a freemium model and your first app is free forever. And at the end of the day all you need to do is make the decision whether those monetary costs outweigh the value you get. And if it doesn't that's fine too. It simply means Boxfuse isn't the right fit for you.

You explicitly asked for suggestions for alternatives. All I did was provide one in case it may prove useful for you.

[eropple]

Boxfuse is not an alternative to Packer, though, except from a very great distance if one squints. It is a restricted platform play. This is why I asked how Boxfuse deploys Zookeeper, not a Zookeeper client. Which it can't do, which makes it even further not an alternative because anybody who's going to have even a moderately complex environment--which is to say "anybody who needs more than RDS"--is going to still need Packer (or a configuration management rig, Packer's just memoizing a lot of the initial stuff you'll re-run on convergence) to build out the rest of the infrastructure.

I'll be honest: I cannot envision a company that should use Boxfuse. Not one. They're better off with something like a Racker template that takes a few parameters and feeds them into Packer than your spooky-action-at-a-distance stuff.