I agree. Things become incredibly murky if preconditions are not clearly seperated from optional settings with sensible defaults. For a server-side multi-user application to just go off hunting for data stores or even create new ones whenever configuration settings are missing seems like a security and data integrity nightmare.<p>If something is a precondition then the app shouldn&#x27;t act like it wasn&#x27;t just to make Docker configuration easier. It needs to fail fast.<p>Retrying database and other connections is sometimes the right thing to do in long running applications. But I dont&#x27; think application launch is the right time for it. Application launch is an opportunity to make sure that all dependencies were in place at some point. If things break later on, the odds of it being a temporary issue are much better.