Chapter 7, Using Third-Party Services, introduced Docker, an isolation framework based on containers. In that chapter, a single container was started directly with the Docker command line. This method is fine for starting a single container, but has several drawbacks:

• All parameters must be provided in the command line, which can be quite long
• If several containers must be started, then multiple commands must be used

One solution to these issues is to use shell scripts that contain all these commands with their parameters. The Docker framework provides a tool dedicated to this task, more generic than custom scripts: Docker Compose.