[nickjj]

> Can’t I just do all what docker-compose does with a Makefile

There's a lot of value in just being able to run a set of unified Docker Compose commands and have things work the same in every case with the same YAML configuration.

But technically yes you could replicate that behavior, however Docker Compose does a bunch of pretty nice things, like when you run docker-compose up it will intelligently recreate containers that changed but leave the others untouched. Then there's the whole concept of override files, etc..

It would take a fair amount of scripting to emulate all of that behavior along with getting all of the signal processing and piping multiple services to 1 terminal output acting well. Even today Docker Compose has issues with that after years of development.

You should run docker-compose with --verbose one day just to see what really happens under the hood. Compose is doing a lot. For example I wrote about this a while back. It also includes an example output of running a single service app with --verbose: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/docker-tip-60-what-really-hap...