Best practice Rancher + Microservices for clients' applications?

Hello all,
New to Rancher 2, used 1.6 but only ever via the GUI. Now though, I am aiming to provision microservices to projects under Rancher 2.

So far, I have been able to successfully create Projects and Namespaces via the REST API.
The next steps I am unsure of. I have a DB with a table of schemas for these services - including name, docker image url and bool for requires a DB instance spinning up.

I thought the best approach would be to create a Catalog and write up these services as helm charts for provisioning as apps in rancher via the API. I am aware currently the repo for the catalog must be public but was thinking about syncing my private repos to a local GIT setup firewalled off from prying eyes for this purpose.

Alternatively, write a DTO to transform my service definitions into Rancher pod deployments into the project.

I would truly appreciate any advice, especially if you can assist in actually addressing the API.

Thank you.