[dzonga]

something that is nice in the container world -- better than docker are lxc containers - but the steward of the project Canonical seem to have done a bad job with it. last time I played with lxc the ux was clunky.

if you could have the automation / configuration of docker / podman for lxc that would have been nice.

[hunter2_]

I've used Proxmox to manage my LXC workloads for years and it's been great, although I'm unaware to what extent it meets your criteria of offering automation. I find its interface to do roughly what a VM host (VirtualBox, VMWare, etc.) can do, but for LXC containers (and QEMU VMs) instead of VMs.