This is where we are going next; CoreOS is super young today though.

We want to build an environment where you run and manage all of those servers and databases inside of containers and via APIs. Or even better skip the APIs and just add nodes and have something like etcd help you configure it dynamically

But, we needed to get all of the foundations solid and that is where we are today.

I just threw together a really simple proof of concept which uses a shell script to spin up a Docker instance running NGinx, and then register the port that instance is listening on with Etcd. Because it's quite so simple, here it is:

`INSTANCE=$(docker run jonwood/nginx-node) && curl http://127.0.0.1:4001/v1/keys/nginx-nodes/$INSTANCE -d $(docker port $INSTANCE 80)`

You'd then use Etcd's tree listing interface to grab the JSON fragments for each of those NGinx nodes, and configure Varnish or HAProxy or something to hit those backends.

Obviously this isn't anywhere near production ready (for example if one of your NGinx instances goes down there's nothing to remove it from the pool), but so far I'm impressed with what CoreOS is doing.

From what I understand, it doesn't. You're expected to already have a container with a web server in it, and a container that already has a database in it. The web server container then uses the CoreOS service discovery feature to find out what IP address the database container listens that, and configures itself.

In other words, it does not replace Chef/Puppet. Maybe only for the configuration part, but not for the installation part. You may still want to use Chef/Puppet for creating the container in the first place.