i would pay, yes. however it would need to be a excellent product. and I don't think that any product the near term could replace a existing ansible/puppet/etc... workflow which contains a bunch of lines (less then 1000 for multiple projects).
as said the only thing gain for docker would be process isolation, so it should be really really awkward simple and useful on low end hardware. (as the other solution already does) and getting process isolation with cgroups isn't too hard on newer kernels. (# systemctl set-property httpd.service CPUShares=500 MemoryLimit=500M)
so what the product needs to have:
- process isolation
- easy configuration
- configure the os/software and update it easily
- nothing more than a bunch of lines per project (no dockerfile frickling)
- binary / git rollouts
Installing kubernetes isn't actually as difficult as you've made it out to be. You'd be able to draft a workflow in less effort in comparable circumstances using puppet and you'll get things such as health checking and failover of your apps for mostly free.
If you're well invested in puppet, using puppet is going to be easier because you know it. You can happily use docker with puppet. Stop puppet from installing $APP and instead use it to docker pull && docker run $APP.
This means the logic for building your application has obviously moved to the Dockerfile. You cannot currently get rid of this logic, only hide it in abstractions. I prefer it living in the apps repo as it's a nice seperation of concerns, but you obviously would prefer it to be magic, which you can have but at the price of versatility.
If you are able write code to build and deploy apps, then moving over to using docker should be pretty trivial for you. However, I actually see docker as a replaceable part, whilst kubernetes might actually be here to stay.
* you need network isolation as well. no point in doing process isolation without it. and thus forwarded ports.
* shared folders to persist necessary files. and thus volumes. and a few years later distributed volumes.
* not just isolate a process, but all its dependencies as well. no point in having a shared .so file which everybody can change, while just a single process is isolated. and thus a whole sandboxed container.
* and then deal with the size of a full sandbox, until you need some way to share unchanged files. and thus images and layers.
* and so on and so on.
big things always start small. at least in docker's case they did start small, and they're still small and lean individual projects. feel free not to use docker compose or anything else.
as said the only thing gain for docker would be process isolation, so it should be really really awkward simple and useful on low end hardware. (as the other solution already does) and getting process isolation with cgroups isn't too hard on newer kernels. (# systemctl set-property httpd.service CPUShares=500 MemoryLimit=500M)
so what the product needs to have: