Should I Run Plain Docker Compose in Production in 2026?

Posted by BrewedDoritos@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 16 comments

[-]

Harha@reddit

No. Use microk8s for single node systems.

[-]

I don't think microk8s is the right kubernetes distribution if you choose to scale up. I will absolutely agree kubernetes even in single node mode is terrific and underutilized. Despite being a little more complex than Docker, when combined with helm it's not difficult at all and is generally much better.

[-]

Harha@reddit

What's a better k8s distro then? I've been running microk8s for years which is why I mentioned it.

[-]

Somepotato@reddit

Imo, k3d. I use it with MetalLB. At least when I used microk8s it was a headache to scale but k3d even lets you use PG instead of etcd.

That said, you can even run Kubernetes (including basically every major distribution of it) in docker for local experimentation especially with ArgoCD, so theres not much excuse for trying Kubernetes

[-]

hornynnerdy69@reddit

Why is this downvoted so much lol, K8s gives you a lot of resiliency that docker compose simply doesn’t. If you want to be extremely lazy and your customers don’t care at all about downtime, by all means, use docker compose. But the effort to set up a single node k8s cluster is minimal, and will pay off in the long run if your project requires any resiliency/uptime

[-]

It won't be able to make sure your containers keep running unless you slap cron jobs or whatever on top of it.

Skill issue.

It's production ready, you just don't want to read the docs.

[-]