[amazingman]

docker-compose trades a better initial UX for far less flexibility and, funnily enough, higher practical complexity in the long run. It's great if you want to get from zero to MVP with as little thinking about what your infrastructure needs will be as possible. It's pretty awful, however, when you want to truly productionalize what you've done and you find out that in order to do so you'll have to use the newest Compose format, and your docker-compose.yml (and possibly additional supporting Compose) files are not at all easier to read or simpler to write than e.g. k8s objects in YAML.

[tmzt]

If you want a single file configuration on k8s, take a look at kedge.org

It's basically an extended version of native k8s yaml with some smart defaults and grouping resources similar to compose.

[amazingman]

One could also just use one file with multiple YAML objects delimited by “\n—-\n”. The Kedge stuff looks moderately interesting, and I definitely would have found it useful a year ago. Now, though, I seem to have developed a begrudging admiration for the “native” YAML format. Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome, but once I finally began to understand Kubernetes I began to find the verbose YAML format to be a benefit rather than a barrier.