Rancher is packaged as a set of Docker containers. This may seem like inception but we build off of the portability guarantees provided by Docker. This means that the storage and networking services we provide should run anywhere Docker runs.
The source code for this project is mostly in https://github.com/rancherio/cattle at the moment. We will be moving things around quite a bit and in the end we will have a lot of repos that comprise the project. https://github.com/rancherio/rancher serves as a meta-repo that packages up all of the other repos.
I haven't really worked with Docker in anger yet - but I guess I could pull down the files / run it and then take a look inside to see how it works.
Is there a link to the original code? Is there a risk that projects are going to start to be released in a way where it's going to take jumping through a couple of hoops to see how they work?
I don't want to sound disparaging to the project (it sounds interesting). I was just curious in having a really quick glance at the code to see if it was something I wanted to keep an eye on.
Some of the images workflow as deploying/removing from a host, replacing existing images (upgrades), dependency management (app image v1.0 depends on Nginx image v2.0), metadata like OS startup scripts (pg image needs to start on boot) seems to already be covered by apt/rpm and that tools like Ansible/others leverage for deployments in infrastructures.
It looks like this is a renaming and refocusing of Sstampede.io, which was discussed before at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8210100
I feel like alternatives to all these services exist already. What AWS provides is packaging and integration.
If I want S3, I can use one of several distributed filestores.
If I want EBS, I can use one of several network disk systems.
If I want queues, or distributed K-V stores, or monitoring, etc etc etc, there are solutions coming out of our collective ears.
AWS is an IaaS. People are paying for the service, not the infrastructure.