im just about giving OPs premise another go. compose just feels so much better as abstraction especially with small and medium setups looking close to the optimum of expressiveness without boilerplate to describe what is needed. The missing pieces seem to also be in the compose compatible “docker stack” aka new docker swarm, which i ignored for probably too long as i assumed it was the discontinued old swarm. Even if new swarm mode sucks how hard can it be to make something compose shaped vs running k8?