When Docker Compose is the right choice for small and medium deployments

For many small and medium systems, Docker Compose is good enough to standardize environments and reduce drift between local development and production.

Its strength is that it is easy to read, easy to write, and lets you group important services such as APIs, databases, Redis, or workers into one deployment workflow.

I usually only move to more complex orchestration when there is a real need for scaling, self-healing, or multi-node management.