Seems a little bit inflated - yes, docker-compose et al, are a problem if you have dozens of services all using different databases. But then, that's a level of

Seems a little bit inflated - yes, docker-compose et al, are a problem if you have dozens of services all using different databases. But then, that's a level of complexity and scale that most applications / organisations won't reach. And if you do reach that, then you probably can afford to invest in something more sophisticated to solve the problem (service mocks, etc). For situations where the true overall complexity is manageable, I think that making sure that the environment can be entirely replicated and bootstrapped easily is actually very good discipline for keeping complexity under control.