thinking about it, I might start on a unbuntu vm I've got floating around to get the containers built then port them across to the raspian cluster later
You would need to rebuild stuff between the VM and Pi's as they're different CPU architectures (so binaries from one won't run on the other). If you've got the build rules setup though it shouldn't be hard to rebuild on the Pi once you've got something that works.
For a similar operating system it might make slightly more sense to use a Debian VM rather than Ubuntu if you're targeting Raspbian, although the differences are probably minimal