I've been working at a Docker shop for a while and I have a feeling it will be the future for running services. It makes systemd somewhat irrelevant.

There are still a lot of issues I've had with Docker, which I won't go into. It also can't replace everything running on your Linux system. But it's a neat idea and big players use it in production for huge workloads.

Now the whole AWS-containers, docker-machine, swarm, mesos, coreos, kubernetes thing is a cluster fuck of choices .. but you have choices. And unlike running an Ansible script on some provides base image (which is totally different from Rackspace, Linode, etc.), you are guaranteed your container will work on any docker engine with little modification (your orchestration files may change though).

I have a feeling, for better or worse, containers will be the future and will stick around long after systemd hopefully dies.