I honestly don't know how much those things cost (I have heard some people say AWS is not cheap, but compared to buying your own hardware maybe all of this stuff is very cheap). The point of asking is, my company has not found a clear place to use Docker directly, but we do use it indirectly through the Deis project, and CoreOS.

My experience with Deis has been wonderful. If you ever looked at Heroku but got to the pricing page and didn't look any further, Deis has the same workflow (and much of the same stack, Cedar) as Heroku. The whole thing is built on docker containers, and designed with failover in mind.

I see that Codeship costs a fair amount of money on the higher end of usage; for the cost of a few months on their enterprise subscription, you could probably build your own CI cluster on Deis. CoreOS also targets AWS, and I don't have any idea what your AWS environment looks like, but you could likely build a Deis cluster on AWS just as easily as you could on your own hardware, if not easier.

I try not to think of Docker as an end so much as a means. For me, it doesn't even matter that it's using Docker under the hood, but if you have containerized your application, Deis can work on already built images just as easily as Heroku works on git repositories.

I can't use Heroku for serious things because it costs too much, and we're small potatoes. But I've got plenty of hardware lying around, and some slightly bigger iron that if I'm being honest is probably underutilized, this is based on knowing that it hosts multiple kernels using virtualization, and the only reason those different tasks run on different machines is to keep them nominally isolated for increased maintainability.

Containerization is "virtualization lite." If I can take those services and jobs that all run on their own virtual machines and make them all run on Deis instead (or even just the ones that don't maintain any internal state of their own), I will gain a resource boost by not having to virtualize all of that separate virtual hardware and individual Linux kernels anymore. The marginal cost of another container is lower than a full virtual machine. If it fits into CI, the maintenance cost is lower too, because that's one less individual system that needs to get apt-get upgrade. If we were better at adopting things like chef, this might not be an argument, but for us it still is.

I inherited a lot of legacy stuff. Your situation might not be anything like mine. If you are already drinking the CI kool-aid, you might not honestly have much to gain from Docker that would compel you to invest time and effort into using it to host your apps.

If Deis looks a little complicated, you might check out dokku. Your laptop probably doesn't have enough power to spin up a whole Deis cluster, but you can still get "almost like the Heroku experience" using Dokku, with Docker under the hood providing support. I'm not going to promise you that it will cut your AWS bills in half, but if you did drink the kool-aid, it might be worth checking out just how much of your currently required development infrastructure and outsourced hosting needs can just go away when you add containerization to your developer toolbelt.