Golo Roden's questions

I want to install CoreOS to the disk of an dedicated server, from a USB stick.

In CoreOS's documentation I found the Installing to Disk guide that requires another Linux set up and running as base. Unfortunately, I do not have that. Instead, I'm running OS X on my MacBook Pro, and I'd like to run installation of CoreOS using a USB stick.

So what I'm thinking of looks like this:

• Prepare a USB stick with CoreOS installer on MacBook Pro.
• Attach USB stick to Intel NUC and boot the machine.
• Wait until CoreOS has been installed, then remove USB stick and reboot Intel NUC.

Is there some way to get this working? If so, how do I do that? If not, what's the easiest alternative?

I'm quite new to all this *aaS thing, and currently I'm trying to wrap my head around concepts and how things basically work.

What puzzles me quite a bit at the moment is the difference between a variety of products, especially the following three:

• OpenStack
• CloudFoundry
• Stackato

The last one is the easiest for me to grasp: It's basically a software that manages application and service instances so you can push a custom-developed application to it and tell it to run this on a number of instances, so Stackato takes care of how to distribute the application.

But now I've read that Stackato is related to CloudFoundry (see http://strongloop.com/strongblog/in-the-loop-stackato-a-platform-as-a-service-that-you-can-deploy-and-manage-yourself/). Are they basically two products similar to each other that you can exchange for one another? Is the one a fork of the other (like Jenkins and Hudson), or how are they related?

And then I've read that you can Install CloudFoundry on top of OpenStack. I initially had thought that OpenStack is basically just another option, but apparently it's not, but something more low-level.

Can anybody please shed some light on this, and give me some hints?

I am a web developer, but I am also interested in a few administrative tasks. Hence, the new move from pure administration to dev-ops comes handy for me.

Anyway, I have some problems to put a few things into a relationship. Maybe there isn't any, so I wanted to ask for help to clarify.

Basically, what I want to put into relation is four types of software (from my understanding). The exact products don't matter, you can place any similar software as an alternative:

• Vagrant: From my understanding is to automate creation and management of VMs: Setting them up, starting and stopping them. This can be done using a local VM or remote, e.g. on a cloud platform.
• Docker: A "lightweight VM", based on a few Linux kernel concepts, which can be used to run processes in isolation, e.g. in a shared web hosting environment.
• Chef: A tool to setup and configure an operating system, e.g. inside a VM.
• OpenStack: A tool that allows you to build your own private cloud, hence comparable to something such as AWS.

Question #1: Are my explanations right, or am I wrong with some (or all) of these consumptions?

Question #2: How could I mix all those tools? Would that make any sense?

In my imagination and from my point of understanding, you could go and

• use OpenStack to build your own cloud,
• use Vagrant to manage the VMs run in the cloud,
• use Chef to setup these VMs
• and finally use Docker to run processes inside the VMs.

Is this correct? And if so, can you give me an advice in how to start using all this (it's quite a lot at the same time, and I don't know yet where to start)?