[davnicwil]

isn't the whole idea of docker compose that it's supposed to be single machine, though?

How likely do you think the introduction of a nodes primitive is given this?

I can see it if it were a strict opt in addition but it feels like it also fundamentally expands the scope of what the tool is.

[robertlagrant]

I agree it would, and I think it's unlikely, but I also think there's a gap between Docker Compose and Kubernetes, and while I know the implementation gap is large, the configuration syntax gap is small. If someone could extend the Compose syntax to include some sort of way to declare what node tags it should/shouldn't run on, and how many, it might be really interesting as a good power for config complexity tradeoff.