There's at least one more usecase IMO: definition of common development lifecycle steps in a shared Makefile across services. At my current workplace, instead o

There's at least one more usecase IMO: definition of common development lifecycle steps in a shared Makefile across services. At my current workplace, instead of having a bunch of bash scripts in every service, I just give every service repo a Makefile that usually is a oneliner where common.mk is included. this just wraps docker-compose and gives us commands like make, make run, make stop, make lint, make test, make help etc. This way we can e.g. have repos using completely different technology stacks but the interface to them is the same - whether it's our database, a node.js webservice, a python data analytics tool etc. and the definition of these lifecycle commands in common.mk are totally trivial, they're just .phony. one-liner rules.