- Are you/have you tried using "FROM" and layering things in multiple images to reduce what you need to keep shipping?
- Anything stopping you from using a private registry? I'm running one at it seems to work quite well (with the caveat that it's annoying to have to specify the registry all the time).
- You talk about "shuffling the data". Does that mean you're not using volumes to keep the data separate from the container? If so, any particular reason?
2) We're using a private Docker Hub account to transfer images to the laptops. They have a script that the users can invoke that shuts down the container, updates, runs some initialization tasks (`db:migrate` + some other stuff) and then brings the container back up.
3) Yep, we're using mounted shared directories in both cases. Previously the laptops of course just stored everything on the local filesystem since they were running the app directly. I'm not 100% sure what the Windows server was doing, but I believe the operator had to move data from one share to another and run initialization tasks by hand.
Now the laptops run the VirtualBox setup and always have the application running in the background. Docker adds value by letting us distribute a much smaller amount of data vs sending out an entire VM image.
For the Windows server, we used to distribute upgrades by sending out an entire VirtualBox appliance image, which was usually around 3GB. Additionally, the operator would have to manually shuffle data between the old and new images. Now, we can ship out an saved Docker image (built with `docker save`) which cuts down on the amount of data transferred, and the final VM we shipped him knows how to upgrade the Docker container and shuffle the data automatically.