[SOLAR_FIELDS]

It’s not a dead end at all. It serves a specific purpose - if you need to have a packaged deliverable that consists of several (3-8) containers, and you want your end users to be able to easily deploy that deliverable, there is no better solution that I am aware of over docker-compose.

I’m not sure why OP feels that way, but I’ll just give two examples of great FOSS projects that live on the bleeding edge that I work with every day that offer docker compose deliverables as their #1 way to get going in prod:

1. Supabase: https://github.com/supabase/supabase/blob/master/docker/dock...

2. Netmaker: https://github.com/gravitl/netmaker/blob/master/compose/dock...

[seiferteric]

Not sure but I think OP is conflating docker compose with docker swarm. Compose to me is just a simple way to define a set of containers and their startup parameters.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

I will say that compose does go a slight step beyond startup parameters - it bundles networking up and says that containers can talk to other containers under certain circumstances.

So it’s not quite a simple specification. It’s capable of some quite strange, interesting and possibly esoteric things.