What is Docker's 'new' direction? I don't see any related announcements on their blog besides adding support on new platforms.
A number of third parties had begun work on various (sometimes proprietary) orchestration and management systems for creating a reliable/scalable/easily manageable cluster with Docker as a building block. CoreOS is one. But Docker is pushing towards an official, open-source orchestration/management system that threatens to make all of those companies irrelevant.
IME examining Docker, this is actually the hard problem.
I think Docker orchestration and coreos can coexist - if I had to use COREOS to use the goodness of Docker, then systemd-nspawn would come and eat Docker's lunch.
I wish that Docker bless one of Ansible/Chef as the official orchestration base and take it forward. I really don't want to earn something Docker specific.
Ansible/Chef orchestration IMHO solves a very different problem than container orchestration.
I agree that Chef and Ansible are different than container orchestration today - especially, when you look at low level stuff like networking, mounts, etc... But I guess what I was saying is that it is not hard to add these features to them.
They already have a specification format that works well and check for idempotency at its core. Unless you mean something like etcd is fundamental to container orchestration, which I don't believe it is (we run a couple of containers in production using Fig)
This was where I first started worrying about CoreOS and Docker divergence.
It had no etcd in it and the POC was implemented as part of the Docker API/CLI, as best I recall. There were significant questions in the discussion about etcd not being there.