How big can you make one compose?

Hi,

I’d like to put together a “complete” setup with applications needed for a non-profit organization. It’s going to be Nextcloud, office, some forum, some cms, mailserver, LDAP, backup, the needed servers, certbot, and whatnot.

Is this something that is common practice to do with docker-compose or is this too complicated to be in one docker-compose file?

I’m also thinking of having one alpha and one beta testsystem and then a production system. The number of members that are going to create modest traffic on a daily basis might be around 300 and the number of members that might use the heavier office- and collaboration apps might be at most 50 on a very busy day.

Does this sound like a swarm is applicable, or can each testsystem run directly on the hostmachine, and can I run one test and one production system on the same VPS or is only one docker-compose instance allowed per machine (that is, do I need to create two docker-machines in order to run two docker-compose on the same VPS).

I’m an amateur SA, I can find a lot of info on the technical details myself, but I’d like to get some hints in the right direction, so that I don’t have to invent the wheel all over…

Thanx!