I do this a lot for Postgres testing. In my setup, I create a single database for the entire test run. Each test creates its own schema in that database and applies the latest table definitions.
With this setup, I only eat the container creation once, while allowing every test to operate in isolation from one another, be parallelized, and test against a real database.
I do a similar trick for S3 containers by applying a unique guid prefix to the buckets in each test.
