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.

There are lot of synonyms, people just choose some words in different contexts based on how they sound. Why use the word “begin” when the word “start” exists?