Container Deployments

Most Docker files we inherit are single-stage, run as root, include development dependencies in production, and have no health checks. We rebuild them correctly: multi-stage builds that produce minimal production images (often 90% smaller), non-root users, explicit health check endpoints, and pinned base image versions for reproducibility.

For Next.js applications, we use the standalone output mode with a properly layered Dockerfile that produces images under 200MB and starts in under 3 seconds. For Python applications, we use slim base images and compile dependencies in a build stage.

Most applications aren't a single container — they're an app server, a database, a cache, a queue, and maybe a background worker. Docker Compose defines all of these as a single reproducible unit, with proper dependency ordering, named networks for isolation, and volume definitions for data persistence.

We design Compose files that work identically in development, CI, and production — with environment-specific overrides for things like replica counts and resource limits. One `docker compose up` and your entire stack is running.

Kubernetes is powerful and complex. Most small teams don't need it, and adding it prematurely creates operational burden that slows development. We help you make this decision honestly: Docker Compose with a good CI/CD pipeline handles most applications up to moderate scale perfectly well.

When you do need Kubernetes — high availability requirements, multi-team environments, complex service meshes — we implement it on k3s (for self-hosted) or managed Kubernetes (EKS, GKE) with proper RBAC, namespacing, and Helm-based deployments.