You can create a virtual networks and have all the related containers running on one of these networks. They can communicate directly to each other in the docke

You can create a virtual networks and have all the related containers running on one of these networks. They can communicate directly to each other in the docker compose method (define a service `foo` and any container on that network can communicate with it like `http://foo/some/endpoint` http://foo/some/endpoint`) or have a some other message bus (redis, rabbitmq, zeromq, kafka whatever you want really) running on the docker network that the other containers use to communicate. Is this the best solution always? Probably not. An example of using a Docker container as an isolated system process would be Spotify's `docker-gc`. https://github.com/spotify/docker-gc https://github.com/spotify/docker-gc