I was in the opposite position I was working at a hosting company in 2010. At that time I was heavily pushing containers, at the times Jails, Zones, LXC, etc. Using a full hypervisor stack for VMWare was not the best use of resources. I honestly haven't kept up with containers too much, other than Kubernetes, Misos, etc.

I'm also thinking they're a stop gap. In the CI work flow it definitley helps with dynamic language, or slim executables. Where dependencies are seperate. But often I see infrastructure almost meshing with the code. A block, in the overall program design. I'm not sure the next step either, often as you said you're looking at a event or service driven architecture. It comes from the pain points you're trying to solve, and how you actually get your code running.