First i'd like to point out that you cannot have a miniature version of production and you cannot reduce maintenance complexity. It violates the fundamental laws of nature. No matter how small, you still have the same number of moving parts, so it's effectively the same when it comes to actually operating and maintaining it.
But lucky for you, Docker provides some ways to run commands on an existing image, like the RHEL patching/updating tools. It should be possible to update an image's files using RHEL's patches, as long as the whole RHEL install is there in the images.
As far as breaking apart these sets of files into disparate dependencies: again, it's totally possible, but it does not simplify nor reduce your maintenance complexity.
Now, some really stupid people would recommend you compile applications from source and deploy them on top of RHEL, and basically build all your deps from scratch. You don't want to do that because a large company has already done that for you and put it into a nice little package called an "rpm". You take these RPMs and you find a simple way to unpack them on the filesystem, make a Docker image out of them, label/version them, and keep them in your Docker image hub. Now you have your RHEL patches as individual Docker images and can deploy them willy-nilly.
(This is, of course, exactly the same as maintenance on systems without Docker, and your dev & production environments would be the same with or without Docker, but Docker does make a handy wrapper for deploying and running individual instances with different dependencies)
But lucky for you, Docker provides some ways to run commands on an existing image, like the RHEL patching/updating tools. It should be possible to update an image's files using RHEL's patches, as long as the whole RHEL install is there in the images.
As far as breaking apart these sets of files into disparate dependencies: again, it's totally possible, but it does not simplify nor reduce your maintenance complexity.
Now, some really stupid people would recommend you compile applications from source and deploy them on top of RHEL, and basically build all your deps from scratch. You don't want to do that because a large company has already done that for you and put it into a nice little package called an "rpm". You take these RPMs and you find a simple way to unpack them on the filesystem, make a Docker image out of them, label/version them, and keep them in your Docker image hub. Now you have your RHEL patches as individual Docker images and can deploy them willy-nilly.
(This is, of course, exactly the same as maintenance on systems without Docker, and your dev & production environments would be the same with or without Docker, but Docker does make a handy wrapper for deploying and running individual instances with different dependencies)