We built Vessel with one thing in mind; it should be easier for people to get work done. With many different applications in our environment, we started to wonder if there was a better way to accomplish that than our existing Vagrant+Puppet development environment.

As we started to explore the use of Docker containers for our development environment it quickly became clear that we would need a tool to automate the process of standing up a virtual machine and starting up all of the containers any given application would depend upon.