On Thu, 10 Aug 2017 08:40:41 +0200 Simon HANNA <simon.hanna@serve-me.info> wrote:
Container images are usually a package of complete OS environment and usually derive from one of the many distribution images. While the common ones like Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Centos are really great and work well, they are really bloated (300 MB for only the base image) for a container image where you only want to run one single process (e.g. Mailman).
Alpine Linux is a lean (5 MB for the base image) Linux distribution which is generally preferred over the common (like Debian for example) operating systems when building container images.
While technically correct, the base image is just needed once on a host. So the 300 MB would only be spent once even if you run thousands of different containers (all based on the same image).
True, but it doesn't offer any superior functionality over using Alpine Linux in most cases. Also, since it has become popular, new software releases find their way faster into Apline Linux than something like Debian.
-- thanks, Abhilash Raj