My point is that "can be seen from space" is an awful way to communicate that. It provides no useful intuition for the scale of "10 inches per year".

We have very good satellites! Lots of things can be seen from space. "can be seen from space" is an awful way to provide readers intuition for the scale of something.

Discovering good locations for data centers is genuinely a difficult problem. They're relatively scarce. Bidding wars seem completely plausible.

The described pattern is standard in Meta. This, along with the infrastructure and tooling to support it, was the single largest "devx quality of life improvement" in my experience moving to big tech.

TL;DR: assuming you've squashed all regular non-determinism (itself a tall ask), you either need to ensure you always batch requests deterministically, or ensure all kernels are "batch invariant" (which is absolutely not common practice to do).

It says docker compose is at the "wrong-level of abstraction", but I kept feeling the author was instead expecting docker compose to solve different problems that it was ever meant to solve.

In fact, they seem to be expecting a highly-opinionated, high-level interface which solves problems that I don't think anyone using docker compose in prod should even be worried about.

A lot of concerns seem to be around avoiding spinning up duplicate instances of reverse proxies, databases, and caches. First of all, why is this a concern? Idle threads have basically no impact on a system, so this generally isn't a concern. This is a nuanced and context-dependent issue, but generally it won't even make the list of top-100 performance bottlenecks for most applications. Yet the article takes for granted that the benefits of solving this problem outweigh the many cons of coupling them together.

Even if you wanted to enforce your applications sharing a postgres instance under the hood, why would you want that to be black-magic performed by the container orchestrator?

Other stuff like DB backups just don't seem like issues docker compose users have. If you need to orchestrate across multiple nodes in order to meet your SLOs, then don't use docker compose.

Finally, it seems like the actual solution is significantly under-discussed. I both have tons of questions about how it's supposed to work, and I see lots of shortcomings with the parts that I do understand.

Beyond the specific issues I see, the fundamental attitude seems to be "force everyone to architect their applications in a very specific way, and don't even try to support any use cases which fall outside of it". You need a damn good reason to be that opinionated about these sorts of things, and it by definition will only work well in specific contexts. I'd be interested to read an article which tried to articulate why such an opinionated API would improve SDLC-considerations over docker-compose, but I don't think that's the article I just read.

Not only is it a stretch to wonder about parallels between a basic Calc II concept and Quantum Field Theory, but is seems like the exponential function is the exact opposite of the example you provided.