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Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?

distr.sh

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Re: Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?

#81

Post by calmoo »

nijave wrote: post #64
stevefan1999 wrote: post #52

I really want something that is Docker Compose but for Kubernetes. I mean that I can have a simple way to declaring resources in just like Docker Compose, but I run the environment in Kubernetes so that I can get to test the behaviors when there are multiple copies of the softwares running together. I do rely on Kubernetes heavily for distributed and networked software deployment, so it is even better if we can emula…

Helm mostly does that. Not a huge fan of a text templating engine generating yaml but once you get your chart setup with a few variable inputs, you can continue using it for a bunch of other stuff with minimal new config. The inputs (values) are yaml so you can make it look exactly like a Docker Compose file if you want (wouldn't be surprised if there's some charts floating around that do that)

I've recently been dipping my toes into k8s / kustomize / helm, and I recently had a situation where having a base deployment yml template that I wanted to reuse across various deployments. I had a look at Helm and I was frankly shocked how bad the templating was with Go templates, it was close to unreadable and felt very brittle!

Re: Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?

#82

Post by threecheese »

philipallstar wrote: post #6

Very cool article. Wish it didn't have silly AI-isms: > This is the shape Distr lands on

I quite like the “shape” term; every type of (sigh…) stakeholder … understands it, and I don’t need to swap in terms like “interface”, api, contract, architecture, structure, etc - unless I want to talk specifically about that thing. Everyone can fit a triangle and parallelogram in their mind, which is just dandy when I’m just trying to communicate difference.

“Lands on”? I like that less.

Re: Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?

#83

Post by jimmydoe »

kjuulh wrote: post #75

I am using docker-compose everywhere. I really enjoy using it. I have a single thing that is annoying for normal production deployments, and that is that it isn't super easy to have a rolling deployment, I just need two replicas for zero downtime deployment, and I don't really want docker swarm. I think it is the networking which breaks at that point, and you have to have a more involved setup, and at that point I'd…

I’m happily taking that 10sec whenever thinking about the lifting I have to do for kube and extra cost.

Re: Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?

#84

Post by merpkz »

sneak wrote: post #71
merpkz wrote: post #57

How do you guys, who run Docker in production deal with managing nftables firewall on hosts running containers? By design docker daemon creates and manages a set of firewall rules to forward traffic between containers and ingress traffic into containers as well as masquarades the outgoing container traffic. That is all well until admin needs to alter hosts firewall to allow and deny other traffic unrelated to docker…

On my docker hosts there is no other traffic unrelated to docker. Everything goes in containers.

Well, as an example we usually set incoming rules to filter SSH only from administrator IP addresses, TCP 10050 only from zabbix monitoring server and leave few icmp types required and rest is dropped and logged.

For forward chain we set docker network ranges to route between themselves and only services actually used in containers. Allow container outgoing connections to our DNS servers, centralized HTTP proxy server and monitoring - nothing else containers are allowed to route to.

And for output is similar, only allow our DNS servers, NTP, HTTP proxy, centralized rsyslog where everything goes and zabbix monitoring server and a few icmp types - nothing else gets out and is logged.

With the advent of these supply chain attacks we read about often here it's just a matter of time some container is compromised and this seems like only viable way to at least somehow limit impact when such an event occurs.

Re: Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?

#85

Post by mkesper »

TheCapeGreek wrote: post #58

Somewhat adjacent in how I look at using Docker at all in prod, here's what I always wonder: Is using Docker/Compose "just" as the layer for installing & managing runtime environment and services correct? Especially for languages like PHP? I.e. am I holding it wrong if I run my "build" processes (npm, composer, etc) on the server at deploy time same as I would without containers? In that sense Docker Composer becomes…

Have a look at multi stage container builds. Your images should not need a build step at start, the result should be in the baked image. Else you become reliant on fetching packages during build etc.

Re: Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?

#86

Post by mkesper »

fabian2k wrote: post #26

My experience with docker-compose is a bit outdated, but my impression some years ago was that it was too sensitive and fragile. I encountered bugs or incompatibilities that broke the docker-compose setup often enough to be forced to pin the specific docker and docker-compose versions. And the error handling was terrible. Most of these problems resulted in a Python stack trace in some docker-compose internals instead…

That was the old docker compose. Things got a lot better since they rewrote it in Golang and update it again.

Re: Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?

#87

Post by rob »

I do this via Dokploy on a hosted Linode VPS and absolutely love it. Super easy to set up and maintain for tons of little side projects that don't require tons of resources.

Seems like an ad for whatever "Distr" is though; I haven't run into any of these issues with Dokploy and everything's been running fine for months.

Re: Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?

#88

Post by Pxtl »

nickjj wrote: post #63

Docker Compose was production ready in 2015 and it still is today. I've lost track of how many projects I've deployed with it and never really ran into a single issue where Docker Compose was at fault. It's super solid. Some time ago I've written about my experiences using it in production https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/why-i-like-using-docker-compo... . Not just for my own projects but for $500 million dollar compan…

Thank you. I had been procrastinating on learning how to work with containers and finally got a handle on Docker Compose to play with self-hosting a coding agent and was worried that I'd once again procrastinated so long that I'd picked something up long after it was already dead.
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