[chr15]

For local development, I use Vagrant + Chef cookbooks to setup my environment. The same Chef cookbooks are used to provision the production servers.

It's not clear to me how I can benefit from Docker given my setup above. Any comments?

[ecnahc515]

Docker really replaces the need for Chef in a sense. You don't need Chef for configuration of your container, because ideally your container should be saved in an image which you use to deploy. This keeps things consistent between your dev environment, staging and production.

Chef is based on re-running the same commands with various different options depending on the environment, and even without any thing in the cookbooks/attributes/environments changing, Chef still cannot guarantee that this run will produce the same results as a run that happened yesterday, simply because it isn't like an image.

[fosk]

I'm new to these tools. Given your explanation, how does Docker replace a packaged Vagrant machine[0] with all the software already pre-installed (without using Chef)?

[0] http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/cli/package.html

[tbrock]

Much lighter weight. Instead of hosting an entire operating system you just host the application.

Imagine spinning up your db instance vm, your web tier vm, your load balancer vm... etc.

Unless you have a ton of ram it isn't going to happen. With docker you can run containers that mimick a very very large infrastructure on your laptop.

[vivab0rg]

What about using Vagrant with the [vagrant-lxc plugin](http://fabiorehm.com/blog/2013/04/28/lxc-provider-for-vagran...)?