Docker Compose provides a quick way to explore HashiCorp Consul's core concepts such as service discovery and secure datacenter deployment on local systems. It allows users to deploy a secure Consul datacenter and understand the Consul architecture and security model through tutorials like Deploy a Secure Datacenter with Docker Compose. The tool also offers several quick-start Consul scenarios that can be spun up with a single command, speeding up time-to-concept understanding and reducing local testing complexity. Docker Compose is an implementation of the infrastructure as code philosophy, providing a lightweight configuration file-based approach to defining environments and services. It's commonly used in development environments but not recommended for production deployments, which are better suited for technologies like Terraform.