Modern applications rely on multiple components, or services, such as database, back-end, front-end, web API, and file sharing. Managing these components can be a difficult task because of the update and security tasks.
Docker compose allows the coordination of multiple containers on a single host. It includes two components : the docker-compose command which helps managing the containers and the docker compose file which defines the services and resources.
Docker compose is included as part of the docker desktop. On Linux, you need to install it after installing the docker engine.
When working with docker compose, we talk about services instead of containers. Services are similar to containers, but they are scaled up and down, restarted if stopped, and can run on multiple nodes.