Is kedro-docker intended more to facilitate local interactive environment? As opposed to packaging a self-contained image artifact intended for distribution to something like an ECS compute cluster ?

You can use it for either?

kedro docker build

creates a very simple Docker image with your project code copied in there, and then there are supporting commands like

kedro docker run

if you want to use that Docker image locally, but it doesn't do anything very special. Some of the deployment guides use the image built using

kedro docker build

, if I recall correctly, since it's a reasonable-enough way to build an image.

Also, in the recent versions of kedro-docker plugin, the

Dockerfile

was modified to allow multi stage build - the first stage:

runtime-environment

only installs the project requirements and the second stage copies the project into docker image. Reasoning behind this is that you can just build the first stage and actually try to perform some interactive development and/or use it for executing the code “you will send to it” (it’s one of the options for Azure ML for example).

Got it