Movim is a social networking client that is based on standards. It uses XMPP under the hood, and utilises the XMPP standards for instant messaging, multi-user chats, and microblogging (amongst others). It covers all the major features of facebook (IMO) as well as being federated, so that people can run their own nodes.
Wired have now joined apple on my list of companies to boycott for life. Personally I'll be adding any company to the list that joins in with this kind of crap - deliberately creating an online 'second class' is unacceptable. Don't let these bastards win.
Libvirt has support for lxc these days, if memory serves. I'd recommend it - docker just seems heavily marketed.
What you're mentioning with hosts/resolv etc is a problem that has been "solved" with tools like etcd and zookeeper as someone else mentioned.
I tried docker with a couple of things, and found that it is an environment that (at the time I experienced it, maybe six months ago) was so unhelpful as to appear completely broken. It isn't for systems administrators, or anyone who knows how to do things the unix way; it's for developers who can't be bothered to learn how to do things sensibly. Half the unix ecosystem has been reimplemented, probably not that well, by people who didn't know it existed in the first place. That's my conclusion so far.
I'm with you on the re-inventing the wheel thing. But: so? It happens, over and over again, pretty much everywhere. Heck, a significantly large portion of technology we see here on HN these days is, to put it bluntly, a lot of re-invention.
But this is really a normal aspect of a healthy, technological ecosphere. Kids grow up, they get interested in a subject, they ignore all the prior art, and they get on with doing things that they think are interesting - including fixing 'whats broke' (which often translates to 'whats not well-known') .. all technology culture suffers this factor. Why complain: its a principle driver of the state of the art, because only the good technology survives this onslaught. If its known-about in the first place, it rarely gets re-invented.
libvirt has had LXC support since time immemorial (2-3 years at least). Unfortunately, it is only really partial support and IIRC its abstractions don't work very well with LXC. Like the other responders, I also evaluated it then decided to avoid it. I have a spider-sense that libvirt was a project by a large Linux company that kind of failed to win traction and is slowly being deprecated.
libvirt seems horribly over-engineered to me. I can't stand it. One of the great appeals of Docker to me is the combination of simplicity, and the index/registry.
As someone managing hundreds of vm's, and who's being doing Linux sys-admin stuff for 20 years, Docker is the best thing that's happened for a very long time.
I'm going to leave this here: https://movim.eu/
Movim is a social networking client that is based on standards. It uses XMPP under the hood, and utilises the XMPP standards for instant messaging, multi-user chats, and microblogging (amongst others). It covers all the major features of facebook (IMO) as well as being federated, so that people can run their own nodes.