we have had previous conversations about making a separate docker image for synthetics enabled agent. This has always been a non-optimal solution, and in this issue I propose we consider evaluating whether we can use dynamic downloading of synthetics dependencies instead.

We would still bundle heartbeat with the agent but the yum dependencies and node etc. would be downloaded on the first indication of the synthetics monitor. One hurdle to overcome would be the fact that those dependencies require the root user to be installed. This could be overcome by shipping a small setuid binary written in golang in the container that would invoke the yum/dnf command and do any other required work.

A downside of this approach would be that for on premises customers we would still need a separate image or they would need to make their own docker image that has this command invoked.

Perhaps we probably still need both images but the default image could do the dynamic download. We could call the larger image the offline version.

@paulb-elastic @mostlyjason @ruflin @drewpost @vigneshshanmugam @andresrc WDYT?