Docker is great! Drink the Kool-aid. Cost of entry isn't much... You can run docker containers pretty much anywhere. You can spin up a complete development environment with web server, database server, messaging queue, and nodejs in one simple swoop on your macbook from a single call to your docker-compose config. Then you can move on to remote into one of your pet Ubuntu servers and run the same config for a quick dev environment. Later, you can take the same dockerized instances of services and spin them up on Kubernetes, Marathon, GCS, or AWS ECR with automatic scaling policies.
This is a pretty good article outlining the simplicity of "cattle" instances: factual.com/blog/docker-mesos-marathon-and-the-en…