Portable AWS-style infrastructure service for Docker

Chief architect of Rancher here. Rancher.io is in fact completely open source. The intention is that Rancher will run below Docker. Rancher currently wraps Docker but going forward that will no longer be the case. We very much want users to use the native Docker CLI and remote API.

Rancher is packaged as a set of Docker containers. This may seem like inception but we build off of the portability guarantees provided by Docker. This means that the storage and networking services we provide should run anywhere Docker runs.

The source code for this project is mostly in https://github.com/rancherio/cattle at the moment. We will be moving things around quite a bit and in the end we will have a lot of repos that comprise the project. https://github.com/rancherio/rancher serves as a meta-repo that packages up all of the other repos.

I went to have a snoop around the code but all I can really see is installation files. Genuine question, is this project closed source?

I haven't really worked with Docker in anger yet - but I guess I could pull down the files / run it and then take a look inside to see how it works.

Is there a link to the original code? Is there a risk that projects are going to start to be released in a way where it's going to take jumping through a couple of hoops to see how they work?

I don't want to sound disparaging to the project (it sounds interesting). I was just curious in having a really quick glance at the code to see if it was something I wanted to keep an eye on.

Off topic to rancher maybe but how about [a tool for] treating (packaging) docker images as [Debian/rpm] packages, at least persistent images (images that are not one shot jobs) ?

Some of the images workflow as deploying/removing from a host, replacing existing images (upgrades), dependency management (app image v1.0 depends on Nginx image v2.0), metadata like OS startup scripts (pg image needs to start on boot) seems to already be covered by apt/rpm and that tools like Ansible/others leverage for deployments in infrastructures.

Here is a blog post announcing the project: http://www.ibuildthecloud.com/blog/2014/11/11/announcing-ran...

It looks like this is a renaming and refocusing of Sstampede.io, which was discussed before at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8210100

Hi, some obligatory HN nay-saying here.

I feel like alternatives to all these services exist already. What AWS provides is packaging and integration.

If I want S3, I can use one of several distributed filestores.

If I want EBS, I can use one of several network disk systems.

If I want queues, or distributed K-V stores, or monitoring, etc etc etc, there are solutions coming out of our collective ears.

AWS is an IaaS. People are paying for the service, not the infrastructure.

The vision seems to be docker on top of rancher on top of docker? Afraid I can't see how this would help? Unless it's just to inspire "yo dawg" Xzibit jokes? b^)

Looking forward to the Volume Management and Load Balancing features. Keep up the good work.