The Compose SDK allows developers to programmatically manage Docker Compose applications from Go code. It provides a comprehensive API for loading, validating, and managing multi-container environments without using the CLI. Key features include creating service instances with NewComposeService(), loading projects from Compose files, and managing container lifecycles. The SDK supports extensive customization through options like custom I/O streams, concurrency limits, and dry-run mode. An EventProcessor interface enables real-time monitoring of operations with built-in implementations for terminal UI, plain text, JSON, and quiet output.