Just to clarify the use case in #11616 (which was marked as a duplicate of this). I am using the profiles to have one profile without and another with redundancy (of solr and zookeeper). This means that a lot of configuration and container dependencies change. Still it is useful to have a stable name of the "lead" container across profiles, as it makes it possible to do "docker cp" and "docker exec" from scripts that are not profile aware. I am using environment variables for a lot, but it does not work for all use cases.

There is also a question of how far do you want to go with such checks ...

$ docker compose -f - up --scale service=2 <<-'EOF'
services:
  service:
    image: nginx
    container_name: service
EOF
WARNING: The "service" service is using the custom container name "service". Docker requires each container to have a unique name. Remove the custom name to scale the service.