[siliconc0w]

Just to oppose the pessimism here - we use docker in production and so far it has worked pretty well. We do run into the problems mentioned in article but they aren't insurmountable. We also built a tool around cluster/deploy management just like we had to do with chef.

IMO any tool that does procedural run-time configuration like chef/ansible/puppet will generally be inferior to an image based infra management solution. (unless you're using said tools to build images - which is another ball of wax that will likely end up looking like a reimplemented docker)

The problem with procedural run-time config is that unless you blow away the VM, build from scratch, and run a test suite you don't really have good assurances your infrastructure is in a good state. With images, you have a bit for bit copy of what was built and tested in CI or QA. This is, for us, worth the price of admission.