[koffiezet]

The biggest advantages though is having to explicitly define al the edges:

- You need persistent storage? You better define it or you'll lose it one the next (re)deploy. - You need to expose network services? Tell me which-ones or it won't work.

If we're talking on small scale single server deploys, it makes backup, upgrade/rollback and migration of applications a LOT easier.

As long as you're not talking about a k8s cluster - which you should avoid with application architectures that aren't "cloud native", I assume you'll have a local docker-compose file which you just start/stop to bring the entire application stack you need (database/app/proxy server/monitoring/...) with one command, which means all external service dependencies are also contained in one 'stack'.

What I also use it for on small-scale apps is having a test environment of the same software running on the same droplet. I just put a Traefik reverse proxy in front of it that autodetects the docker containers, handles HTTPS/ACME certificates and routes the test-url to the test-containers, the real URL to the "production" containers, and they're all isolated.