By "linking them" what do you mean exactly? Building container hierarchies using "FROM"? Exposing services through ports? Exposing resources through volumes?

By "linking them" what do you mean exactly? Building container hierarchies using "FROM"? Exposing services through ports? Exposing resources through volumes? If your application is simple, then sure, you can get away with almost any deployment and provisioning approach and it'll work "well enough". But these linking capabilities and products like Chef exist for more complex scenarios, and it would do you well to investigate the rationale behind them before being so dismissive. I currently have a requirement to run 100s of applications provided by mutually untrusted 3rd parties, and co-ordinate startup/shutdown (for backup) and RPC access to these applications. I need to be able to start an arbitrary combination of these applications on a node, depending on load (I cannot foresee the bandwidth/CPU requirements of each application without running it, and it will change unpredictably over time, sometimes to the point where a 1Gb/s link will be saturated by a single application for a few hours, and then change again to a trickle). Sometimes I need to start multiple copies of this infrastructure for independent services that I may need to bring up/down independently. In my scenario, using Docker alone to deploy the whole caboodle is not a maintainable solution. Using Docker to package the untrusted applications and selectively expose just the volumes for backup and a single port to just the host control process (keeping applications from talking to one another), and Chef to deploy/undeploy applications to nodes in arbitrary and constantly varying configurations that automatically rewire themselves is very maintainable. The way I use these tools: - Chef/Puppet/etc. = infrastructure deployment and configuration management - Docker = application deployment and confinement This separation is useful because the operations people can do their job, and the developers can do theirs, without stepping on each others toes and with minimal co-ordination. If you do everything in Docker, the ops team has a nightmare managing change in complex applications; if you do everything in Chef, your developers suddenly have to become Chefs, which is overkill and will waste time co-coordinating with the ops people. My example above is childs play compared to what some organisations need to deploy and manage.