> But imagine the complete deployment looks like 2 monoliths, a dozen supporting webservices, 3 databases, redis, an elasticsearch cluster, ActiveMQ and a mails

> But imagine the complete deployment looks like 2 monoliths, a dozen supporting webservices, 3 databases, redis, an elasticsearch cluster, ActiveMQ and a mailserver. Make sense, in such case you probably want to transition your production environment from compose to one node swarm cluster (docker running in swarm mode). Then you just define ingress server (caddy/nginx/haproxy/traefik), probably some service you want to share like a database and use docker stacks (docker stack deploy) where you can keep config for each stack separated. This approach is very modular yet still relatively simple to maintain once you understand concepts around docker swarm and how docker stacks work. If you want to be more robust, you can describe your deployment in simple ansible recipes, but I found this approach a bit cumbersome and try to stick with simple readme file for deployment as long as possible. For more complex deployments I'm toying with an idea of diving into hashicorp nomad but this type of tools requires a dedicated devops team which makes sense for large multi-node deployments when swarm allows you to keep stack very simple as most devs already know docker-compose and the learning curve to maintain swarm clusters is still approachable compared to properly diving into devops world.