docker-compose is slow and not quite parallel (because it's written in Python and uses requests internally). So your yearning for speed optimization is kind of misplaced. If you are using docker-compose, you probably don't care about speed anyways. And, the way I understand it's typically used is to create some slice of the system a developer is working on, so unless we are talking about many minutes difference, the speed gains are inconsequential. Also, because you are using it to deploy just the relevant part of the system, the setup won't be complicated -- it's counterproductive to do that in a completely local system and especially because you want to work with as few components as possible during such deployments.

So, how would I go about that in Shell? I don't see a problem. Can you point to a specific problem? All these settings in your example easily translate into docker commands.