[physicles]

We do this, but with k3s instead of docker compose (it’s a wonderful single-box substitute for full k8s), and a developer starts by building the relevant container images locally. If everything works, it takes about 3 minutes to get to a working environment with about a dozen services.

We steer clear of proprietary cloud services. In place of S3, we use minio.

The one sore spot I haven’t been able to solve yet is interactive debugging. k8s pushes you toward a model where all services need a pile of environment variables to run, so setting these up is pretty painful. In practice, though, all rapid iteration happens inside unit tests, so not having interactive debugging isn’t much of a productivity drag.