I've always thought of the whole containerization and orchestration "hotness" (I guess we're calling it "gifee" now?) to be great for people who want to write their own PaaS. And not really anybody else.

I mean, it's great that the pieces are all there and open source now. You can get to a really great place with automation by gluing together Docker/Rocket, Mesos/Kubernetes, etcd/zookeeper, etc. But for now, a complete solution still requires you to bring a lot of your own glue.

I mean, by the time you've actually covered enough edge cases to make all these ops components work together in a meaningful way, in a way that doesn't doesn't fail randomly or trip over itself when some critical component breaks, you may as well just start charging other people money to use it.

I say this from the point of view of someone who's done it all (implemented a private Heroku on the stack described above [1]), and although it works amazingly well (for literally hundreds of internal apps), it was not trivial... not even close. We're talking probably 1-2 man-years of effort to get it to the point where it's usable, and that's with leveraging as much existing tech as we can.

To anybody else, as in, any company who actually wants to ship a product (where the product isn't just a PaaS), I just don't see how it's worth it. Just use heroku (or elastic beanstalk, or appengine, or whatever.)

[1] I'd love to make all the glue open source but I'm not really in a position to do so. But I suspect I'm not the only person who's done this... I really think anybody who's gotten this whole "the future" stack working solidly is in a similar position as me: if you really did get the job done for a single app, chances are you've invented an internal Heroku of your own.