LAB 16.2 Autostarting lxc containers

Hello,

While going through the labs I've noticed that in LAB 16.2 beside of creating another copy of a bucketX container and adding it to the load balancer in bucket container, it is also written

... have all of the containers and web servers automatically start at boot time

In the lab solution this demand is completely ignored.

In the course material there is a table in LXC section with lxc command line utilities and among others lxc-autostart - Set a LXC container to automatically start at boot time

This however doesn't seem to work, and when we look at lxc-autostart man page, it says:

lxc-autostart processes containers with lxc.start.auto set. It lets the user start, shutdown, kill, restart containers in the right order, waiting the right time... etc.

So to start, for example bucket container at boot, we need to
# echo "lxc.start.auto = 1" >> /var/lib/lxc/bucket/config

My first question is - is there a more elegant way of doing this, with some command for example ?

While looking for this solution, I've stumbled upon a lot of articles using lxc command, but this command is not working for containers created with lxc-create (?)
#lxc list doesn't show my containers while # lxc-ls -f does and if I do
# lxc config set bucket boot.autostart true
I get an Error: not found

Which then I realized is normal, because lxc command is a client for LXD, which is built on top of LXC...

And that brings me to my second questions - since LXD apparently adds some security and advanced features to LXC containers, can one still use LXC containers in a production environment and what would be the use case ?

Thanks in advance !