I second this, we've been running Docker Compose in production for years and love it. It's massively simplified our production environment, and for a company that only serves 100,000-1,000,000 monthly hits it's the perfect middle ground. We've tried k8s several times and have always ended up going back because we didn't need the complexity.
We even run compose v2.4 to retain the ability to set container memory/cpu limits and define startup order with healthchecks because we don't need the complexity of swarm and v2.4 provides everything we need. Sometimes simple is best.
I personally use compose to manage services on my own laptop and homelab as well, it just has the massive advantage of being the greatest common denominator that everyone can pick up in a few days if they're familiar with basic container concepts.
We even run compose v2.4 to retain the ability to set container memory/cpu limits and define startup order with healthchecks because we don't need the complexity of swarm and v2.4 provides everything we need. Sometimes simple is best.
I personally use compose to manage services on my own laptop and homelab as well, it just has the massive advantage of being the greatest common denominator that everyone can pick up in a few days if they're familiar with basic container concepts.