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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

Docker compose is great, I use it a lot for local development and testing of distributed systems. With a few tweaks you can simulate almost anything in containers including systemd and low-level networking stuff, which e.g. makes simulating an entire Ansible based setup trivial.

Too bad Docker doesn't seem to push this much, with a bit of extra work this probably could be the deployment platform for 95 % of all software systems.

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Docker compose is also fine for production environments, if you are okay with a few minutes downtime during updates and your application is just running on one or two machines. Even 90% of the enterprise systems I worked with so far were okay with those restrictions.

Sooo much simpler than k8s.

FWIW ECS supports rolling updated for docker compose deployments: https://docs.docker.com/cloud/ecs-integration/#rolling-updat...

I also really like Docker Compose. Where I think it struggles is when you have to get off the single node and on to network services. Then it starts to have less relevance. I know Swarm was meant to fix that, but I never tried it.

Conceptually, if I could just have an extra component to docker compose, where I install a little agent on to my nodes, I name my nodes (or nodegroups) in my d-c file as to what should go where, and have a master node that I do docker-compose up on, and I can represent an external service (e.g. AWS RDS) as a virtual service with an endpoint to connect to, and it all magically deploys, I think that would be incredibly powerful.

Maybe that was Docker Swarm, of course.

This still is Docker Swarm.

The news about its death are just plain wrong. There are new features in the most recent release of moby/moby and development in general has been picking up again:

https://docs.docker.com/engine/release-notes/23.0/

I don't understand. Is this common usage or some unique setup you've discovered?

I think the parent comment is saying that it's a shame Docker aren't pushing docker-compose more in general, rather than a specific use case. Assuming they are, I have to agree. Docker-compose is excellent for so many use cases where swarm, nomad, or k8s would be too much but straight docker isn't enough. Seeing more investment in compose would be fantastic.

Well, the good news is compose v2 is a huge improvement and they've been releasing at a much higher cadence than v1.

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