The conclusion from these is not that Docker sucks, but YOU HAVE TO LEARN it. I agree that it's a very steep learning curve, but after the pieces come together, Docker solves quite a lot of problem and actually very useful.
Could you point me to good piece of documentation or success story of running Docker in production?
(I do use Docker, but it requires to learn Kubernetes or DCOS to do anything production-related. And those are separate projects).
The documentation just plain sucks. The doc parts that don't suck are outdated, and therefore useless.
As long as that is the case, you are going to have people who go through the exact same troubles with Docker time and time again (one theme is databases in docker).
In essence, it is impossible to work with an existing Docker-managed host from another computer. I often work from home, and when I wanted to manage my Docker hosts from my laptop, it turned out to be impossible and this issue was closed without resolution.
This was the day when I gave up on using native Docker.
Nothing of it is documented, of course.
I know this doesn't help with your current issue on docker-machine, but... I think the issue here is docker-machine's primary intent is as a developer tool to spin up dev environments quickly and easily (zero-to-docker as we say), as such the datastore and security model is tailored to this. We are working on production-level infrastructure management, the base-layer of which you can find here: https://github.com/docker/infrakit
(Or, how else should I provision Docker on multiple non-AWS hosts at once?)
I agree with the article that many of the official docs around use-cases (non-reference material) is outdated and difficult to keep up to date.