[d33]

I'd argue that it wouldn't be that steep if Docker wasn't trying to do too much. There's so many moving parts - apart from regular process isolation, you've got to manage storage (which can be a pain in the ass) and firewall configuration (which is another very complicated and not well documented topic). In any non-trivial setup those two topics are already big.

Now add container management - understanding the split between images and containers, then how to publish and download images (which IMHO should be a completely separate project), how caching works so you could write a decent Dockerfile... And then there are features like Docker Swarm which I never touched and seem particularly complex to me.

It's way too many projects stuffed into one thing.

[e12e]

The feeling you describe reminds me of how I felt evaluating puppet and chef some years back - with a particular view to running the open source parts (not being dependent on third party support).

It felt like every other link led back to the various sales teams for the enterprise solutions, and there existed no page with a straightforward overview of all the components and what puppet / chef actually did.

Ansible was a breath of fresh air - as well as saltstack (but at the time it had too many holes in its security/transport story).