I love Docker Compose. It is simple to use, easy to organize and manage, and very robust. Also, our company does not need to "scale" production aggressively. Our production load is very predictable, so Docker Compose fits like a glove.

We have been using it for more than five years now. Before that, we had a legacy deployment model, and I do not remember a single major issue related to Docker Compose.

We use it for both staging and production environments. The same Docker image validated in staging is deployed to production. Never fails!

Extremely debatable. They still have never fully implemented health checks and auto healing. I have had compose itself behave in unexpected ways, weird things like not realizing the tag of an image it is running is actually in use, and letting prune commands yank it out from under the system. Other things I can't remember. I'd rather use something like Nomad or for simpler systems maybe plain systemd. But realistically kubernetes is a superior orchestrator in just about every way, and installing k3s is simple and k3s is actually production ready. I don't like kubernetes all that much as cluster tech, but as a container orchestrator it has a lot of nice features.

How do I backup docker volumes? I never found a native flow for backing up docker compose projects.

While not built in k8s has at least velero and kasten. However they are only possible because of snapshots https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/storage/volume-snapshots... and kasten has a plugin like architecture (because of k8s ) that supports application specific backups. However I never found something like that for compose. And that is troublesome in bigger projects like sentry

Really liked reading your blog. Bookmarked for future. One question: for databases, do you recommend using containers as well because in development, I love the ease of using databases in docker compose as well but I always worry about production in terms of resilience. Thoughts ?

Hey, just want to say thank you for your blog. I've learned so much about Docker, dev tooling, and engineering from reading it over the past 7 years.

If the project fits on a single server (which it probably can in 2026) docker compose is great.

Have you read the article?

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.