I guess they stopped doing this and now consider the product mature from looking at their website, but Docker Compose used to tell you that it wasn't suitable or intended for production use. That seemed like a pretty good reason not to do it.
Compose has its own footguns, but I've run a number of services with just Compose on a VM or direct on bare metal and the few little issues I've had were easy to debug and fix.
Very much unlike Kubernetes, where even a small deployment can sometimes be maddening to debug. Great for larger deployments where complexity is basically guaranteed, but anything that could run on one server with a hot spare is a great fit for Compose!
Surprised to hear you think debugging in kubernetes is maddening. It’s absolutely very different, but if I had to debug a system I knew nothing about, I’d rather debug a kubernetes based system rather than any other. Standards and all that. Anyways - for a single container or two obviously you’re right - I’m just not sure that’s so common outside of a side project anymore.
Especially because "production" implies an ingress controller, monitoring, etc. Does a Docker Compose-based production setup contain run its own Nginx with its own manually-wired rules? Its own Prometheus?
Compared to Compose on a single server, Kubernetes deployments can have multiple layers (control plane, containers, usually some sidecars) where little quirks occur.
It almost necessitates deeper monitoring and/or extra tools to give a dashboard/'single pane of glass', whereas I can run Compose and just log into the individual server and jump around logs.
Kubernetes control plane is the same as docker daemon.
Sidecars do not exist in kubernetes, unless you install something that adds them.
Containers are... containers? The same containers you'd see in docker.
Kubernetes does not need deeper monitoring compared to docker. You can jump around kubernetes logs just like you do with docker. Except you don't even need to log into individual server.
I don't use any kind of dashboard for my kubernetes cluster. I installed kubernetes-dashboard, so developers and managers can enjoy their dashboards but I've found no value with it. kubectl is more than enough.
