Hi Isi,

We moved away from docker images for the reasons you mention, and because they otherwise had issues for us. We are already using artifactory (as hinted by the environment variables mentioned in my post). I wanted to try further improving the startup times. The approach suggested in other posts of putting wheel files on a volume somewhere and installing them manually seems hard to maintain and potentially unreliable.

I was using both all purpose and job clusters, more all-purpose for ease of testing / iteration, but both would be required in the productive solution.

I will consider your answer as a "No" to my original question.

In general, there should be clear documentation regarding which pip variables / configuration options can be used - some are empirically available, others not, but I couldn't find exhaustive documentation confirming that fact.