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Docker Compose

Define and run multi-container applications with Docker
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What is Docker Compose?

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.
Docker Compose is a tool in the Container Tools category of a tech stack.
Docker Compose is an open source tool with 32K GitHub stars and 5K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Docker Compose's open source repository on GitHub

Who uses Docker Compose?

Companies
2144 companies reportedly use Docker Compose in their tech stacks, including Udemy, StackShare, and HENNGE K.K..

Developers
18260 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Docker Compose.

Docker Compose Integrations

Docker, CircleCI, Rancher, GoLand, and Codefresh are some of the popular tools that integrate with Docker Compose. Here's a list of all 26 tools that integrate with Docker Compose.
Pros of Docker Compose
123
Multi-container descriptor
110
Fast development environment setup
79
Easy linking of containers
68
Simple yaml configuration
60
Easy setup
16
Yml or yaml format
12
Use Standard Docker API
8
Open source
5
Go from template to application in minutes
5
Can choose Discovery Backend
4
Scalable
4
Easy configuration
4
Kubernetes integration
3
Quick and easy
Decisions about Docker Compose

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Docker Compose in their tech stack.

Joshua Dean Küpper
CEO at Scrayos UG (haftungsbeschränkt) · | 12 upvotes · 344.9K views

We've already been monitoring Agones for a few years now, but we only adapted Kubernetes in mid 2021, so we could never use it until then. Transitioning to Kubernetes has overall been a blast. There's definitely a steep learning curve associated with it, but for us, it was certainly worth it. And Agones plays definitely a part in it.

We previously scheduled our game servers with Docker Compose and Docker Swarm, but that always felt a little brittle and like a really "manual" process, even though everything was already dockerized. For matchmaking, we didn't have any solution yet.

After we did tons of local testing, we deployed our first production-ready Kubernetes cluster with #kubespray and deployed Agones (with Helm) on it. The installation was very easy and the official chart had just the right amount of knobs for us!

The aspect, that we were the most stunned about, is how seamless Agones integrates into the Kubernetes infrastructure. It reuses existing mechanisms like the Health Pings and extends them with more resource states and other properties that are unique to game servers. But you're still free to use it however you like: One GameServer per Game-Session, one GameServer for multiple Game-Sessions (in parallel or reusing existing servers), custom allocation mechanisms, webhook-based scaling, ... we didn't run into any dead ends yet.

One thing, that I was a little worried about in the beginning, was the SDK integration, as there was no official one for Minecraft/Java. And the two available inofficial ones didn't satisfy our requirements for the SDK. Therefore, we went and developed our own SDK and ... it was super easy! Agones does publish their Protobuf files and so we could generate the stubs with #Protoc. The existing documentation regarding Client-SDKs from Agones was a great help in writing our own documentation for the interface methods.

And they even have excellent tooling for testing your own SDK implementations. With the use of Testcontainers we could just spin up the local SDK testing image for each of the integration tests and could confirm that our SDK is working fine. We discovered a very small inconsistency for one of the interface methods, submitted an issue and a corresponding PR and it was merged within less than 24 hours.

We've now been using Agones for a few months and it has proven to be very reliable, easy to manage and just a great tool in general.

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Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 8.9M views

Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

  • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
  • Respectively Git as revision control system
  • SourceTree as Git GUI
  • Visual Studio Code as IDE
  • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
  • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
  • SonarQube as quality gate
  • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
  • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
  • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
  • Heroku for deploying in test environments
  • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
  • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
  • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
  • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
  • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

  • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
  • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
  • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
  • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
  • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
  • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
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Denys
Software engineer at Typeform · | 13 upvotes · 1.7M views
Shared insights
at
  • Go because it's easy and simple, facilitates collaboration , and also it's fast, scalable, powerful.
  • Visual Studio Code because it has one of the most sophisticated Go language support plugins.
  • Vim because it's Vim
  • Git because it's Git
  • Docker and Docker Compose because it's quick and easy to have reproducible builds/tests with them
  • Arch Linux because Docker for Mac/Win is a disaster for the human nervous system, and Arch is the coolest Linux distro so far
  • Stack Overflow because of Copy-Paste Driven Development
  • JavaScript and Python when a something needs to be coded for yesterday
  • PhpStorm because it saves me like 300 "Ctrl+F" key strokes a minute
  • cURL because terminal all the way
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Joshua Dean Küpper
CEO at Scrayos UG (haftungsbeschränkt) · | 1 upvote · 16.9K views

Aside from our Minecraft-infrastructure, we compose it with ... Docker Compose! (kinda obious, eh .. ?) This includes for example the web-services, aswell as the monitoring and mail-infrastructure.

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Blog Posts

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Docker Compose Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Docker Compose?
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
Docker
The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere
Docker Swarm
Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.
Helm
Helm is the best way to find, share, and use software built for Kubernetes.
Ansible
Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.
See all alternatives

Docker Compose's Followers
15881 developers follow Docker Compose to keep up with related blogs and decisions.