For me, I really enjoy how basic it is. I’ve never missed any of these things for my simple single-host scenarios.
However with Kubernetes your infrastructure will be ready to scale. You need to expose both front-end and back-end services under the same host? No need to tinker with nginx configs, you just create two ingresses and do it in a standardized way. You need to run your service with two replicas and rolling zero-downtime update? Kubernetes has it out of the box. Good luck implementing all the necessary dances with custom docker-compose setup without dropped requests. You want to customize healthcheck? Kubernetes got you covered with all the imaginable scenarios.
The only missing block in Kubernetes is support for building containers. This is implemented with docker-compose extremely elegantly and simple. That I admit.
That is true if you already have Kubernetes. If you don't, then you still need to run and configure the Kubernetes' control plane (e.g. kube-apiserver, etcd, scheduler, etc). Doing that alone may exceed the complexity of a simple setup.
I say this as someone who has looked at Kubernetes a lot and wanted to use it, but could never justify it. I have concluded multiple times that docker compose is a better fit for my use case.
> However with Kubernetes your infrastructure will be ready to scale.
True, but for many purposes you aren't gonna need it.
I hope you're not putting something like that in production.
Every time you hear yourself saying Kubernetes, "only", and "just" on the same sentence, please pause for a moment.
This Cult of Kubernetes has to go.
90% of the projects won't need scale. You're paying forward for something you won't use most of the time.
Speaking as a k8s admin.
"Simple setups" in Kubernetes will have massive amounts of complexity and overhead, they're just buried in a different abstraction layer.
If you have "free" k8s and don't need to touch it operationally? Sure, do everything with it!
But somebody is going to have to run that k8s environment. If it's you, and you're not a k8s expert, then you'd better buckle up, because all that hidden complexity is now your problem.
In the world where you need to deploy "an app" to "a VM", the simplicity of docker-compose is a sweet spot that any developer can grok without needing an encyclopedic knowledge of how to manage it.