> If you are an average Joe developer and you want to use containers in production, just stick with a machine with docker-compose on it. It's a lot easier to maintain and has far fewer surprises down the road.

This is exactly what I am doing. It's easy to configure and almost same configuration between local test and production machines. The only downside is it's hard to monitor whether service is up without additional tools, which I lazy to research.

Additionally if you don't have a good enough ci cd yet you can deploy with volume-linked container.