> I know that you probably do much much more.... but it will be nice to gradually scale out the components.
Agreed. There are intermediate options.
To try a full Cloud Foundry that fits into a laptop, you can install PCFDev[0].
As an intermediate position, you can install BOSH-lite in the cloud. You lose a major advantage of Cloud Foundry, though, which is that it's a distributed system which BOSH can keep alive.
Similarly, the default installation for Cloud Foundry uses 20 VMs. You can, if you wish, consolidate these to fewer. It's a matter of copying and pasting some YAML. But not recommended in the interests of robustness.
> but it would be nice to have something more standard (like Chef, Salt or Ansible. Ansible would be the closest thing to BOSH). These are extremely flexible tools... but far more accessible.
I have not used Ansible or Salt. I did spend time with cfengine, Puppet and Chef a few years back.
BOSH's concept of operations is a complete inversion of those tools. cfengine, Puppet or Chef take a system as it is and transform it, through declared goals, into the system you want it to be.
This actually means they have to do with a great deal of incidental complexity. Different distros, different versions of distros, different packaging tools and so on and so forth.
The BOSH paradigm is: wait, why are you trying to automate the construction of pets? You want cattle. So it starts with a fixed OS base image and installs packages in a fixed, non-negotiable way. At the low level, very inflexible. But it allows BOSH to focus on the business of installing, upgrading, repairing and reconfiguring distributed systems as single systems. The single distributed system is where BOSH starts, not where it was extended to. It's an important distinction.
> Docker. I know that you have the Garden repository to run Docker.... but I dont think its production ready.
Strictly, Garden can run Docker images. It's an API with driver backends. The original Garden-Linux backend is being replaced by one which uses runC instead. No point replicating engineering effort if we can share it with Docker.
But the problem is not that its unsexy... its inaccessible.
You're right. We're in the classic position of other heavy, robust tech. Hard to tinker with. I've been jawboning anyone inside Pivotal about this for years. We're making headway -- PCFDev is a start, bosh-bootloader is under active development and BOSH itself is going to get major love.
But compared to docker swarm or k8s, it's harder to set up an experimental instance.