But there's also a landrush going on. Everyone has worked out that owning building blocks isn't where the money is. The money is in the platform. Businesses don't want to pay people to assemble a snowflake. They want a turnkey.
CoreOS, Docker and Red Hat are in the mix. So too my employers, Pivotal, who are (disclosure) the majority donors of engineering for Cloud Foundry. IBM is also betting on Cloud Foundry with BlueMix, GE with Predix, HPE with Helion and SAP with HANA Cloud Platform.
You're probably sick of me turning up in threads like these, resembling one of the beardier desert prophets, constantly muttering "Cloud Foundry, Cloud Foundry".
It's because we've already built the platform. I feel like Mugatu pointing this out over and over. We're there! No need to wait!
A distributed, in-place upgradeable, 12-factor oriented, containerising, log-draining, routing platform. The intellectual lovechild of Google and Heroku. Basically, it's like someone installed all the cool things (Docker, Kubernetes, some sort of distributed log system, a router, a service injection framework) for you. Done. Dusted. You can just focus on the apps and services you're building, because that's usually what end users actually care about.
And we know it works really well. We know of stable 10k app instance scale production instances that are running right now. That's real app instances, by the way: fully loaded, fully staged, fully logging, fully routed, fully service injected, fully distributed across execution cells. Real, critical-path business workloads. Front-page-of-the-WSJ-if-it-dies workloads.
Our next stretch goal is to benchmark 250k real app instances. If you need more than 250,000 copies of your apps and services running, then you probably have more engineers than we do. Though I guess you could probably stretch to running two copies of Cloud Foundry, if you really had to.
OK, a big downside: BOSH is the deployment and upgrade system. It's not very approachable, in the way that an Abrams main battle tank is less approachable than a Honda Civic (and for a similar reason). We're working on that.
The other downside: it's not sexy front-page-of-HN tech. We didn't use Docker, it didn't exist. Or Kubernetes, it didn't exist. We didn't use Terraform or CloudFormation ... they didn't exist.
Docker will get all this stuff right. I mean that sincerely. They've got too many smart engineers to fail to hammer it down. More to the point, Docker have an unassailable brand position. Not to be discounted. Microsoft regularly pulled did this kind of thing for decades and made mad, crazy cash money the whole way along.