You can manually load a docker image to a server when you need to. This is useful to get around DockerHub rate limiting in an urgent situation.

# On your laptop.
docker pull busybox:1.4.1
docker save busybox:1.34.1 > busybox-1-34-1.tar
aws s3 cp busybox1-341.tar s3://your-s3-bucket/busybox-1-34-1.tar

# On remote node.
aws s3 cp s3://your-s3-bucket/busybox-1-34-1.tar /tmp/busybox-1-34-1.tar
docker load -i busybox-1-34-1.tar

You can use anything that both your local host and the target host have access to. I just used s3 as it was most convenient in my case. We have SSH disabled on our production nodes, or you could have just SSH’d it across too.