I really enjoy these type of conversations, learn a lot.

Since you’ve gotten lots of good advice on container manager, I’ll encourage your desire for IaC/DevOps CM, etc.

I believe all the leading CM choices support what you’re wanting to do. I can’t guide you on which one to chose, but just browse through the options or functions your favorite does for the Kx container solution you go with.

I use SALT because of Security Onion, and open source IDS. I have all my nix systems being babysat by SALT, and can have a new x-arr media server, NGINX, blog, etc running in the amount of time to deploy the template (I use vSphere) and salt applies the desired state. Back up and restore a mount folder, np. IaC is only limited by your imagination. I have salt also specifying all the containers I have running, defining the config files, etc. Basically poor mans/simpleton kub.

I suspect you already know this, but if there isn’t a module that directly does what you want like running SQL specific functions, you can just have it run programmatic CLI files on the host, or in the container for you.

I am in the process of moving my IaC code from manager file system to Gitlab. I imagine you’d do this from jump street. Have fun.