I use Ansible to manage the configuration between all of the different pieces of equipment, and because it's agentless I can even manage things like networking devices all from one repo.

Docker Compose is just another part of my "infrastructure as code" initiative and allows me to build isolated pieces of systems with their own volumes and networks.

Currently looking to move to Swarm or Kubernetes due to a few issues I have with Rancher.

Linux containers are so much more lightweight than VMs which is quite important for my limited budget. However, Docker has much more support and tooling for it unlike LXC, hence why I use it. rkt is interesting, although I will probably stick with Docker due to being more widespread.

For my homelab, stability doesn't matter as much and I would rather have the latest features, hence why I'm using Fedora Server instead of CentOS. Also, I like -and use- Red Hat-based distros more than others.

InfluxDB ingests information from various sources (mostly Telegraf instances) into one place for monitoring purposes.

Grafana takes the data from InfluxDB and presents it in a nice flexible format. Bonus points for built-in alerts and playlists (cycles through different dashboards automatically)