alt Hacker NewsI'm totally onboard with k3s/k8s being better in a lot of cases.
But docker compose can actually be very sufficient for what many projects actually need.
Granted I am a guy pushing for compose based localdevs and such but going further you often just cannot beat the simplicity of doing update QA or other CI/CD workloads in compose based projects. I have had dozens of projects where we replaced flaky slow and maintenance heavy pipelines with just docker compose up --build --wait in the past years. How come you say health checks are still broken?
I do use compose for some things, smaller one off type setups, and I’ve done the compose up --build CI/CD approach before. I’m generally not a fan of building on the production node outside of very small deployments. It can work, I just think it tends to blur the line between build and runtime more than I’m comfortable with.
Some of my concerns with compose aren’t purely technical. It makes it easier to lean on local state like volumes, bind mounts, and large .env files. Similar mechanisms exist in kubernetes, but the additional setup tends to force a bit more thought about whether they’re actually needed or just a shortcut.
On the health check side, they exist, but compose doesn’t fully act on them, that's the part that is missing. There’s no built in remediation or orchestration behavior tied to health status, which is why things like https://github.com/willfarrell/docker-autoheal exist. It’s something that was never fully carried through in Docker itself.