Docker Compose Isn't Enough

I suspect I probably felt like that at one time but it seems fine now after repeated use.

It says docker compose is at the "wrong-level of abstraction", but I kept feeling the author was instead expecting docker compose to solve different problems that it was ever meant to solve.

In fact, they seem to be expecting a highly-opinionated, high-level interface which solves problems that I don't think anyone using docker compose in prod should even be worried about.

A lot of concerns seem to be around avoiding spinning up duplicate instances of reverse proxies, databases, and caches. First of all, why is this a concern? Idle threads have basically no impact on a system, so this generally isn't a concern. This is a nuanced and context-dependent issue, but generally it won't even make the list of top-100 performance bottlenecks for most applications. Yet the article takes for granted that the benefits of solving this problem outweigh the many cons of coupling them together.

Even if you wanted to enforce your applications sharing a postgres instance under the hood, why would you want that to be black-magic performed by the container orchestrator?

Other stuff like DB backups just don't seem like issues docker compose users have. If you need to orchestrate across multiple nodes in order to meet your SLOs, then don't use docker compose.

Finally, it seems like the actual solution is significantly under-discussed. I both have tons of questions about how it's supposed to work, and I see lots of shortcomings with the parts that I do understand.

Beyond the specific issues I see, the fundamental attitude seems to be "force everyone to architect their applications in a very specific way, and don't even try to support any use cases which fall outside of it". You need a damn good reason to be that opinionated about these sorts of things, and it by definition will only work well in specific contexts. I'd be interested to read an article which tried to articulate why such an opinionated API would improve SDLC-considerations over docker-compose, but I don't think that's the article I just read.

Article wasn't convincing enough about docker compose's shortcomings. The linked github's README even less convincing. But to each his own.

There are pre-existing paradigms for service brokers, message passing, etc., they all try to solve this problem, and they all share this same fault, they become in-extensible...

Which is the core programming tradeoff, flexibility vs robust constrained behavior.

On the extreme end of flexibility you have AI goop you barely understand, but arguably it is far more flexible than anything you ever wrote, even if you can't make any guarantees about what it does, on the other hand you have these declarative things that work fantastic if that's what you wanted, but probably not worth getting into computers for...