And remember, friends don’t let friends use latest. Pin the versions in your manifests and version control everything.

Same, I have a bunch of “inbox” folders and drop files into my server or desktop from my phone with 3 clicks.

For the physical hosts / bare metal I use fluentbit, with Loki as the backend. Grafana for visualization and alerts. This gives me utilization metrics and uptime monitoring. The app containers themselves I do not monitor.

Wifi pretty much excludes k*s and I assume that swarm and Nomad would be impacted by blips in the wireless connectivity. You can try how things work out with a load balancer / reverse proxy on a wired connection, which then checks the downstream services and routes the request to available instances.

Please look into Wifi-specific issues related to the various orchestration platforms before deciding to try one out. Hypervisor is usually a win win, until you try to do failover.

I personally stepped away from compose. You mentioned that you want a more declarative setup. Give Ansible a try. It is primarily for config management, but you can easily deploy containerized apps and correlate configs, hosts etc.

I usually write roles for some more specialized setups like my HTTP reverse proxy, the arrs etc. Then I keep everything in my inventory and var files. I’m really happy and I really can tear things down and rebuild quickly. One thing to point out is that the compose module for Ansible is basically unusable. I use the docker container module instead. Works well so far and it keeps my containers running without restarting them unnecessarily.