You can use chef and docker together, if you really want to. Containers do provide some benefits as others have mentioned in this thread ( Packaging, avoiding conflicts, maybe even as a chroot on steroids for isolation purposes).

You could have a server managed by chef which installs docker, pulls down a number of containers and then launches them, hooking them together if required. If random ports are used, chef can capture these and then hook into a load balancer to register the containers.

You can even have chef build containers from a Dockerfile, to make sure they have the latest updates, tag the image and then launch them.

So many options it often makes your head spin :-)