[zaksoup]

I'm surprised BOSH isn't brought up more when I see discussions on stateless deployment. Maybe I'm biased as I spent some months as an intern on that team but I definitely think it has a place in a thread like this. Check out http://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh or the #bosh channel on freenode

[dinfarfar]

I agree, BOSH is pretty darn cool. Once you have learned the quirks of it.

Currently I think a couple of things that stands in the way of it being more widespread.

* Its tedious to create a new release.

* The documentation is scattered.

* Distributing a release can be a bit tricky. Spiff + deployment templates doesn't really scale that well. For CF we have to pipe to a mod script just because the original templates are not flexible enough, i.e "./generate-manifest infra stub.yml | ./add-extra-releases-and-change-static-logging-levels-and-other-random-stuff > manifest.yml"

* Its sufficiently different even for a seasoned admin that it will take some time to get up and running and understanding how stuff fits together end to end. Currently it feels like the only way to understand BOSH is to understand BOSH.

[zaksoup]

Those are really good points and they're actively working on improving all of the points you've mentioned. I can't encourage you enough to join the IRC channel or create Github issues, especially with regards to the documentation. I personally spent a significant portion of time working directly with the project manager on improving the documentation, but your feedback too is invaluable. Please speak up about these issues to the team or submit pull requests. They love to see this kind of feedback and these kinds of contributions.

[sysk]

For what it's worth, I tried to run the CloudFoundry release on my local BOSH installation and it froze my Macbook. I'm sure it's very useful in cloud environments or on beefier machines, but it's not very useable for local development vs something like Docker which doesn't require a bunch of VMs.

[zaksoup]

To be fair, deploying the CF release to your local machine with something like BOSH lite is not the most resource conservative. I think that you hit the nail on the head when you say it's intended for beefier machines or smaller cloud deployments. That being said CF release is huge. If you want to deploy your own software packages in a custom release against bosh lite for development purposes I think you might find that to be less temperamental.

[sysk]

I thought creating a BOSH release would be too much work but I will try that. What would be nice is if BOSH could abstract a cluster of VMs as a single Docker host and let me operate on containers instead of VMs (I'm not sure if that's possible at the moment without significant work).