Deploy Multi-Container Apps with Docker Compose

Docker Compose is the declarative way to define and run multi-container applications. A single compose.yaml file describes every service in a stack (web tier, API tier, database, cache, queue), the networks they share, the volumes that persist their data, and the dependencies between them. Compose then drives the entire lifecycle of that stack with one command, eliminating the long shell scripts teams used to maintain to glue docker run invocations together.

Compose matters because real applications are rarely a single container. A frontend talks to an API, the API talks to a database, the database may rely on a cache, and every developer on the team needs the same stack to spin up identically on their machine, in CI, and in staging. Compose gives that stack a portable, version-controlled definition, and the docker compose up and docker compose down commands give teams a reliable on/off switch for the whole environment.

Objectives

By completing this intermediate lab, you will be able to:

• Author a compose.yaml defining a three-service stack (nginx frontend, Python API, Postgres database) with images, build contexts, ports, and environment variables.
• Configure service-to-service communication using Compose's default project network and DNS-based service name resolution.
• Order container startup with depends_on and condition: service_healthy, backed by a Postgres healthcheck.
• Bring the stack up, inspect running services with docker compose ps and docker compose logs, then tear everything down cleanly with docker compose down.

Who is this lab for?

This lab is designed for:

• Developers who run individual containers and want to graduate to multi-service application stacks.
• DevOps engineers building reproducible local development environments for their teams.
• Platform engineers who maintain Compose-based test stacks for CI pipelines.