Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?

Personally I have moved to k3s, although after learning a bit too deep how k8s operates when writing custom controllers at the day job.

Docker/containers are great, especially for local development. But I feel the docker compose model quickly becomes a lot of messy brittle squeeze for little gain when multiple containers need to integrate.

Better then to just take the plunge for the "real deal" and set up a non-HA k8s/k3s cluster with the interactions between the workloads clearly specified.

In other words. I care care more about the interactions declaratively spelled out than the "scale to the moon" HA, auto-scaling, replicas or whatever people get sold on.

And LLMs make this even easier. If you love reviewing yaml manifests....

Yes. It's perfectly fine.

when did docker get production-ready?

Yes.

It's nice to get an easy question every once in a while.

I am doing just this. Running docker compose on a server. When there will be to many microservices, we will move them in managed Kubernetes on a cloud platform or Nomad if any cloud platform offers it.

sign... another ai written article. are we already living in the dead internet? hackernews is filled with ai written blog posts.

It seems nomad and consul would be another good choice before reaching for Kubernetes, no?

No

> if you close the operational gaps it leaves: cleanup, healing, image pinning, socket security, and updates.

Ie you need a sysadmin. Oops, you fired them all 10 years ago when the agile devopsing became the best thing after the pumpkin latte.

I really liked the specific actionable steps in the TLDR.

No

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AI article with 27 occurrences of dashes —