having pants do it all for you might be a struggle at present, as there's no existing public docker/container plugin.

but you could do the container building outside of pants.

I don't know enough about GCP to make a sensible comment about anything specific to it

But adding comments to this ticket explaining what use-cases you have for Docker and how you envision Pants helping would be great: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/2648

For example, do you want to build Docker images with embedded pants-built binaries?

Do docker images built by Pants reference other docker images built by Pants (in

FROM

lines)? If so, how? Should Pants also be tagging the images for this purpose?

Lots of small design questions... 🙂

And a big one is: Is this about Pants running natively and invoking

docker

on your behalf, setting up the context appropriately and so on? Or is it about running Pants inside a Docker container (which you can do today, but there's always room for improvement)?