Building Better Containers: A Survey of Container Build Tools [I]

If you stick to the industry standard method of building containers (Dockerfiles), its easy to build containers that contain libraries, tools, binaries, and more that you dont need. One survey sho …

If you stick to the “industry standard” method of building containers (Dockerfiles), it’s easy to build containers that contain libraries, tools, binaries, and more that you don’t need. One survey showed that over 75% of containers contain a full Operating Systems. So how can you build containers that only contain the bits you require to run a particular application, and nothing more. This talk will cover various tools in the open source community that provide better methods for building containers, no matter the underlying container runtime. We will explore Bazel (along with Distroless), Smith (from Oracle), and Habitat (from Chef), and we will cover the benefits and drawbacks of each method. A short demo of each tool will be included.