Not entirely sure what you're asking, but you should probably look into "schedulers" and other tools built on top of such ecosystems. Here are a few to get you started:

Docker ecosystem: swarm and/or compose

Mesos ecosystem: Chronos, Aurora, Marathon

CoreOS ecosystem: fleet

Hashicorp: Terraform

Amazon Container Service: works with the above, will likely build their own simple one in the near future

This is less about embedding images and about managing/"scheduling" them

Edit: Zikes mentioned Kubernetes, as well.