Installing kubernetes isn't actually as difficult as you've made it out to be. You'd be able to draft a workflow in less effort in comparable circumstances usi

Installing kubernetes isn't actually as difficult as you've made it out to be. You'd be able to draft a workflow in less effort in comparable circumstances using puppet and you'll get things such as health checking and failover of your apps for mostly free. If you're well invested in puppet, using puppet is going to be easier because you know it. You can happily use docker with puppet. Stop puppet from installing $APP and instead use it to docker pull && docker run $APP. This means the logic for building your application has obviously moved to the Dockerfile. You cannot currently get rid of this logic, only hide it in abstractions. I prefer it living in the apps repo as it's a nice seperation of concerns, but you obviously would prefer it to be magic, which you can have but at the price of versatility. If you are able write code to build and deploy apps, then moving over to using docker should be pretty trivial for you. However, I actually see docker as a replaceable part, whilst kubernetes might actually be here to stay.