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Comment by meirelles | Hacker News Reader

For my use case chef makes much more sense. I like docker, actually is a very important tool to my development environment and testing, but with many moving parts in production, some of them needing persist data, would be a hell split and manage so many app containers. I can't see how Docker would help me save time. To production LXC/KVM/nothing + chef is usually better to me.

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You can use chef and docker together, if you really want to. Containers do provide some benefits as others have mentioned in this thread ( Packaging, avoiding conflicts, maybe even as a chroot on steroids for isolation purposes).

You could have a server managed by chef which installs docker, pulls down a number of containers and then launches them, hooking them together if required. If random ports are used, chef can capture these and then hook into a load balancer to register the containers.

You can even have chef build containers from a Dockerfile, to make sure they have the latest updates, tag the image and then launch them.

So many options it often makes your head spin :-)

Yes. I agree with you. Have many other good uses for Docker. But I found LXC easier, as it's possible assign a public IP and let the chef mange the iptables/service discover exactly like a VM/baremetal. Docker drops almost all caps, which is great for security, but isn't possible a container manage his own isolated iptables.

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