Great news. I'm not a fan of Docker's new monolithic approach to containerization. Things like orchestration and networking should not be included in docker, but rather pluggable.
The Docker image registry and image management should really be a separate program as well - that is a huge pain point that Rocket seems more likely to get right.
I think all in all, CoreOS has built out a ton of tools to make using Docker easier, and they're all very well defined, and compossible. I'd even say that a lot of docker's features could be completely removed by using some of these tools.
Links? Nah just use ips/dns + etcd for service discovery.
Networking? Need very basic bridged networking, and flannel will handle communication on a single host, or multihost.
Deployment? Use fleet.
Not that all these are 100% perfect like I've made them out to be, but any individual component could be swapped out if you want.
I'd like a tool that makes this linking easier outside of Docker, but for now this is one of the features I like about it (although holy moly do Docker links have a lot of baggage you have to bring along for the ride, like giving everything names).
I don't like the sound of locking into one vendor for everything.
I like some of the ideas behind the CoreOS tools, but until they start playing well with others, they're a non-starter for me. I'm not interested in tools that try to lock me into other, inferior, tools.
(I only ask because it doesn't look like it is your core business)
To clarify, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with what Docker's doing, but it is at odds with an entirely open, pluggable system. It doesn't make any sense for their business model to truly make it easy to just use their containers and none of the revenue-generating offerings.