You may be interested in my DockerDNA project, which uses Ansible to provision Docker images via boilerplate Dockerfile. I suspect an Ansible module which (re-)implements what I’m doing with docker-dna would be more efficient.
I’m also beginning work on a project similar to yours with the use case being high performance warehouse scale cluster orchestration with Docker + Ansible + Ceph + Mesos/Marathon/Chronos, etc.
^ The image there is out of date (it was a very early sketch mostly for my own use, anyway). I’m no longer planning to use Docker in Docker anymore, except perhaps where Marathon executes Docker containers.