These are great points, but with the post I wanted to share how I approach designing and building docker containers, because I hope it saves others time building them. When I started trying to deploy containers on production without Docker Compose it was painful. Now that I know what that time sink feels like, I try to focus on using configuration management during initialization inside the container instead of at the Dockerfile RUN directive (which requires a rebuild).

Back to your points, can I ask if you are interested in using this container approach to build a database container cluster in docker and then benchmark against a working imgadm(1M) + SmartOS environment? From the docker-side when I scale out a cluster of database runtime-only containers, I utilize the volume mounting attribute that is commented out in the repo's compose file (https://github.com/jay-johnson/docker-schema-prototyping-wit...) and then host the database files outside of the containers in a persistent storage location that is mounted + available on the hosts where the docker containers are running. As for building the database container for this proposed solution I would still utilize this Docker Compose-centric approach in development and then in production because I can build the container one time and not deal with a rebuild which invalidates testing a container within my DevOps artifact pipeline.

Wrapping up, I live more on the application development side so I cannot speak specifically to SmartOS or imgadm(1M), but I know the docker documentation and community are pretty helpful for getting/finding technical solutions that helped me build + launch products (go team!). If you are interested we can discuss more details about how I would approach bench marking these two database environments. I am a big proponent of testing everything and I would enjoy discussing how to tackle a db perf/load/ha + test harness like my message simulator (https://github.com/GetLevvel/message-simulator).

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn anytime: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jay-johnson-27a68b8a