Containers, and in particular Docker, are quickly transforming how we think about software architecture. Despite its popularity, there are two big problems that have not been fully solved yet: composability, and multi-node deployment of containers. Many products from big companies are trying to address them, but there is not a clear leader yet.

In this talk we discuss our experiences in the Arabidopsis Information Portal and in the Agave platform. We are able to compose arbitrary images into new images that provide a layer of service discovery and monitoring. These extra features allow us to deploy a fully distributed and self healing network of containers. We leverage powerful, but lightweight, technologies such as supervisor, ansible, and the gossip protocol.