Somewhere around your second self-hosted app, a very persuasive voice appears — usually from a YouTube thumbnail — and tells you that you need Kubernetes. Containers at scale! Declarative infrastructure! The thing Google runs!

Maybe. But let me offer the less glamorous truth from someone who runs both: most people running a handful of apps do not need Kubernetes, and Docker Compose is the better tool for them. Not because Kubernetes is bad, but because every tool charges rent, and Kubernetes charges it in complexity.

What Docker Compose actually is

One YAML file that describes your whole stack.…