I’ve been using Emacs for at least 15 years, and man, am I excited to someday learn it.

I’d absolutely recommend Kubernetes (k3s/rke2) or podman quadlets. Quadlets are a lot easier to get started with, but are still very flexible.

I’d recommend against using portainer. I tried it quite recently and I did not like it at all. A lot of features are paywalled, and was overall just a frustrating experience. I’ve heard it was a lot better some years ago.