It would be better if you put a footer or a developer's view of the technology, otherwise overarching claims about its features could back-fire. MongoDB over-marketed themselves vis-a-vis the features it actually provided.
I think there is no shame in saying we use LXC container technology. We can run on these systems patched, on these with a custom kernel, on these inside a VM. "Virtually anywhere is a bit of a stretch" I think.
* We are adding swappable execution drivers to docker, so that you can replace lxc (the current default) with openvz, or gracefully degrade to a simple chroot.
That is a cool feature, I like it. Libvirt does this for regular VMs.
> In both cases, you still get the benefit of a unique (as in byte-for-byte unique) payload which can be transferred across machines and executed with strong guarantees of repeatability and consistency.
Good stuff. That sounds like a good plan.
What about a Docker cluster (or maybe you already have that and I am showing my ignorance here). Run docker on a variant of host platforms and docker containers could contain tags that identify what kernel/distro/arch is needed and it would be automatically started/migrated to that host. But it would done rather transparently.
Low resource VMs will be something hosting providers will jump on as that is direct money in the pocket (can put more lightweight VMs on a physical host). But instead of having a generic set of uniform host, they'd just provide the right mix of dist/kernel/arch flavors, underneath. "Oh look people love their Ubuntu 13.10 servers, quickly add more Ubuntu hosts" stuff like that.
> Docker solves that.
Docker is good stuff. I like. My criticism was not of Docker's product but its marketing.