Improve test isolation and concurrency by implementing a linux containers plugin

[Mohan Raj R]

When I tested out docker (a linux container implementation), one of the obvious use cases I saw for it was to implement a nose-docker plugin that runs the tests in docker containers. This would achieve couple of things:

• Improve the isolation of tests (and thereby)
• Improve the ability to execute tests in parallel
• Improve the way setup and teardown is done in tests. Common setup for a bunch of tests can be done on a container, committed and then all tests based on that setup can be run (in parallel) on that container. Since the containers can be thrown away after running a test, some or all teardown steps can be skipped.

This should dramatically improve the time of execution of a test suite. One of the biggest drawbacks would be that this would not be cross platform and even in linux would work only when all the requirements for running docker is met (newer kernel etc).

I would like to work on creating this plugin. 

But since this seems like such an obvious idea, wondering if anyone is working on it or have any thoughts on this?
Any pointers to help development of the plugin is appreciated (I have no experience in developing a nose plugin)?

Thanks,

(Initially posted as an issue #768 in github, but re-posting here based on comment.)