What operating system is your host driven by? If it’s not Linux, you’ll end up installing a VM which runs the docker anyway…

I do my elixir work directly on macOS, but I also work on a larger JVM-based project and we decided to do development on Google Cloud Platform.

We spin up a preemptible instance whenever we want to do work and use Mutagen to sync local files to the remote machine and to forward ports. We then edit files locally and use local web browsers to hit the local ports which get forwarded to the remote machine. An ansible script for setup and few simple bash scripts for starting and stopping everything keeps it all pretty simple.

A 4 CPU machine with 15GB RAM is USD$0.04 per hour (pro-rated to the minute and only accruing charges when the machine is running) which is pretty cheap especially if you’re not going to be using it 24x7. Google might choose to shut your machine down if they need it back (that’s the preemptible part, and the reason why it’s only 20% the price of a regular server) but because all of our work is written to our local disk before being synced up to the remote machine, there’s no risk of data loss.

Docker is not a VM!

But it runs in a linux VM if your host system is windows.

If you use docker4windows then the MS hypervisor is used, it will allocate the necessary memory for the VM on creation, and even if enough is available in the system, chance is that creation of the machine will fail. I had a lot of trouble using it. It never properly worked for me.

Docker Toolbox though uses VirtualBox and memory for the VM is allocated in a more host friendly way, and in general my experience using it was much better than with docker4windows.

So, your best bet is probably USB-boot into a Linux2Go.

This also solves your “I don’t want to install anything” problem.