This is a strange argument to me. It’s essentially that the additional complexity of docker compose is acceptable because other things are unnecessarily complex. The problem is complexity. There are many great projects that are just “build the binary, edit config file, and run it,” and why should things be more complex than that? It’s wild to me what people will put up with.
> It’s essentially that the additional complexity of docker compose is acceptable because other things are unnecessarily complex.
Not quite. My point was that the complexity of Docker is, in many cases, worth it because it hides a lot of the complexity of running software. Yes, you trade one problem for another, but the nice thing about Docker is, if you really go all in on it, the knowledge of how to use it transfers to pretty much any software you want to run.
For example, I wanted to run a JVM-based service the other day. Having never done this before, spinning it up with Docker took two minutes—I didn't have to figure out JDK vs runtime, which version I needed to install, etc. And yet, if I want to configure it past the defaults in the future, the image exposes several environment variables that make it easy.
