Announcing Docker Machine Beta

In you&#x27;re interested, we also announced beta versions of Swarm and Compose today:<p><a href="http://blog.docker.com/2015/02/scaling-docker-with-swarm/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.docker.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;scaling-docker-with-swarm&#x2F;</a><p><a href="http://blog.docker.com/2015/02/announcing-docker-compose/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.docker.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;announcing-docker-compose&#x2F;</a><p>And a sneak preview of how these tools can work together:<p><a href="http://blog.docker.com/2015/02/orchestrating-docker-with-machine-swarm-and-compose/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.docker.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;orchestrating-docker-with-mac...</a>

It looks interesting but seems like a very Docker-centric Packer[0] in that it has code to create ready to go with Docker images on various cloud providers and virtual machines.<p>The real hurdle and problems you&#x27;ll be solving with Docker are when you have containers on separate hosts. Will Machine handle configuring firewalls, SSL, SSH keys and all that jazz across hosts so containers can reach each other? I&#x27;ve automated a lot of this myself but would love something that does it for you (other than the existing discovery service tools that often introduce problems of their own). From the post it seems like Machine will also handle this but I wonder how and how well.<p>[0] - <a href="https://packer.io/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;packer.io&#x2F;</a>

This looks pretty interesting. Could someone give me a good use-case for this? I suppose spinning up dev environment on a host other than localhost could be useful? I could also see this being useful as an interface for multiple docker-installed production environments.<p>Perhaps someone could give me a &quot;for instance.&quot;

Thank you but I like NixOS &amp; nixops too much.

This looks like an interesting project. I&#x27;d have to spend some time with it to determine if it would suit my deployment needs. I wrote a tool to help with docker deployment <a href="https://github.com/mrinterweb/freighter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mrinterweb&#x2F;freighter</a>.

Am I missing something here? No KVM as a provider (or on the forthcoming list).

I just started learning Docker the other day and was curious as to how I could use it to deploy to Digital Ocean, then I saw this! Great timing :)

Does anyone know if this could this replace boot2docker on the Mac? I just tried it and it seems to have similar functionality.

I didn&#x27;t see a clear &quot;Read the Documentation here&quot; link on the article. That&#x27;s a bit disappointing.<p>Here&#x27;s what I found with a quick search on Google: <a href="https://docs.docker.com/machine/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.docker.com&#x2F;machine&#x2F;</a>

That sounds like a Docker-only competitor to Vagrant: it would be interesting to have a direct features comparaison because Vagrant is already pretty handy, even with Docker boxes.