Is it possible to access a hardware device with a Docker image under Windows?

Question

Recently, a native Docker client for Windows was released (>= Windows 7).

I wonder: is it possible to forward access to physical devices, running Windows as host

Answer 1

This is a bad practice as it goes against the design philosophy of containers.

If you find yourself needing access to a hardware device, it's better to consider full virtualization such as VMware, Hyper-V, KVM/QEMU, Xen and so on.

However, the "proper" way is to design your system so that hardware is abstracted into a network service. In this way, you deploy the service to physical machines to which the hardware is attached, and call them over the network. I don't know if this is possible in your case, but such decoupling provides a significant architectural advantage.