As someone who has spent many years working on my smart home, I suggest, as do others, KEEP IT LOCAL.
I never understood this 'chicken and egg' analogy. Dinosaurs were laying eggs millions of years before they became chickens.
It starts with a docker-compose file. There's lots of persistent data and it's in volume mounts. I don't know if I'm making a lot of sense, I'm new to Docker and don't know all the right words to use yet.
If you have more than a few machines and are starting to lose track of which cables go where, and which IPs you're using, netbox is a good resource.
The volumes that start with ./ I can deal with. It's those 3 at the end I don't know about.