I believe you can limit a unit to 1 vCPU and 256MB of memory by using something like the following:
[Service]
CPUQuota=100% # 100% of a core
MemoryLimit=256MB
Red Hat has some documentation[1] as well if the systemd stuff is too oblique.
[0]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.res...
[1]: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...
You can use cgroups[1] to do this, because that's what your container runtime is doing. People don't know this because they think these features have something to do with their container runtime and that's what they use, so no one discovers it.
Plus, the user facing tools for cgroups are slightly hideous. And that won't ever get fixed for the reasons previously stated. Sigh.
Also, I'm sure a lot of people would appreciate learning about your tuning techniques, containers or otherwise. Consider writing it up.
[1] circa 2007...
Just be beware of same problems like swap trap (limiting only memory and not memory and swap will just make apps hitting the memory limit start to swap like hell)