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

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.