Docker, CoreOS, fleet, and etcd have completely changed how I build projects. It's made me much more productive.

I'm working on Strata, which is a building management & commissioning system for property owners of high-rise smart buildings. It's currently deployed in a single building in downtown Toronto, and it's pulling in data from thousands of devices, and presenting it in real-time via an API and a dashboard.

So in this building, I have a massive server. 2 CPUs, 10 cores each, 128GB of RAM, the works. It came with VMWare ESXi.

I have 10 instances of CoreOS running, each identical, but with multiple NICs provisioned for each so that they can communicate with the building subsystems.

I built every "app" in its own Docker container. That means PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, my Django app, my websocket server, even Nginx, all run in their own containers. They advertise themselves into etcd, and any dependencies are pulled from etcd. That means that the Django app gets the addresses for the PostgreSQL and Redis servers from etcd, and connects that way. If these values change, each container restarts itself as needed.

I also have a number of workers to crawl the network and pull in data. Deployment is just a matter of running 'fleetctl start overlord@{1..9}.service', and it's deployed across every machine in my cluster.

With this setup, adding machines, or adding containers is straightforward and flexible.

Furthermore, for development, I run the same Docker containers locally via Vagrant, building and pushing as needed. And when I applied for YC, I spun up 3 CoreOS instances on DigitalOcean and ran the fleet files there.

As I said, I've been able to streamline development and make it super agile with Docker & CoreOS. Oh, and I'm the only one working on this. I figure if I can do it on my own, imagine what a team of engineers can do.

Very powerful stuff.