You should dive into Mesosphere. The resources available are quite robust. With only a tenuous grasp on the larger concepts I was able to architect a system with Mesos + Chronos for job queueing and Marathon for container deployment and moved some of my hobby projects to it. For less than $150 a month or so you could provision 3 primary and 3 worker boxes and get a start.

And once you have a real system, you can start looking into the principles of the underlying pieces such as Zookeeper etc.