Tilt is great but it doesn’t solve the problem you’re asking about. This project more directly addresses that. Fundamentally the problem is that you want to maintain the lifecycle of several services during an ephemeral ci run and tear them down when you are done. As you mentioned it gets unwieldy and annoying to try to run all of these on a single machine and doubly so when you have a lot of services/containers. Kubedock is more like what you are looking for, it translates compose calls to Kube equivalents and each service in the compose file is it’s one kube pod with its own lifecycle. It should be possible under that to do what you are saying, spawn multiple docker composes from a single run.

It is worth noting that Kubedock has some really annoying limitations, part of it is that it’s one person the other part is that some concepts don’t translate to kube very well. So make sure that whatever you will be doing fits into those constraints before you try it