> Docker compose is a dead end AFAIK, it's not deprecated or anything, but the community power behind it has essentially moved to other things (Kubernetes, but also wasmer, nomad, skaffold).

> While Docker Desktop / Podman / Rancher Desktop combined with stuff like Skaffold aren't exactly a drop-in replacement for docker-compose, it does do a much better job at bringing up and tearing down entire compositions while re-using existing packaging and access controls.

I don't know about this: in my experience the mentioned alternatives are generally way more complex and cumbersome to initially set up, for smaller projects.

I've seen successful projects use Docker Compose locally for all of the dependencies that need to run in containers (sometimes the apps run locally, for easier debugging, other times they also run in containers for no need to setup a runtime). I've even seen Docker Compose be used in production for projects that don't need to scale that much - just one server in which these containers run not that dissimilarly from what you might get with systemd services on a single node.

And when the need to scale out finally arises, then something like Docker Swarm (which uses the Compose specification) has been enough in the majority of cases, when you don't need anything too fancy (e.g. network partitioning, a la Istio/Kiali). It's extremely simple to setup and works really well, especially with something like Portainer. In addition, its integration with Ansible is also pretty great - though I'd advise Ansible in most cases in general, when you manage the underlying servers.

And I know that many claim that Swarm is dead - though in my eyes it's also basically feature complete and still gets new releases and bug fixes alongside Docker (which others claim is also dead); a bit of caution and having migration paths (e.g. Kompose) doesn't hurt, of course. When you do need (or desire to) run something more "current", then Nomad becomes sufficient on the servers, but I haven't had the need to run it locally, ever - since your environment descriptions will still be reasonably simple, you can just use Docker Compose locally and the HCL equivalent on servers, provided that you have dev/test/staging environments before prod to test everything out on, even if this is a drawback.

If you do decide to go with Kubernetes, then in my experience k0s, K3s (developed by Rancher) or even MicroK8s are all excellent starting points, but at that point you'll probably also want Helm charts and will essentially need something like Skaffold locally. When you get to that point, however, I've found that dealing with the complexity of Helm charts and running Kubernetes locally has more overhead than just using Swarm.

> It does get a whole lot easier when you have a common foundation you can re-use. Spinning up an entire stack with security, monitoring, alerting, automatic rollouts/rollbacks for even the smallest project is just single-digit minutes work now.

This is an excellent point, however! Maybe the DevOps cultures I've seen haven't been strong enough, though, since this has never really been the case in my experience and each service had a bit of custom work to be done for these aspects.

> Pulling in some other factors: how sharable/collaboratable is something these days if it is not built on similar enough technologies and modules? A solo yolo project might not care much about this, but when was the last time someone asked for software that is risky and not durable?

Here's a counterpoint - while many out there might be in the sweet spot where they can just pay someone else to give them a managed Kubernetes cluster, what about those who can't? What about those who decide to use Kubernetes, but have to host and upgrade their own clusters? It can easily become less durable and more risky, especially if your DevOps/Ops people aren't familiar with all of the nuances of Kubernetes.

Right tool for the job and all. Sometimes it's a great choice, other times it's risky.