The package ecosystem is the biggest challenge for Alpine. It's just not there and there's only so much you can do yourself. You need to have enough critical ma

The package ecosystem is the biggest challenge for Alpine. It's just not there and there's only so much you can do yourself. You need to have enough critical mass before the majority of the 3rd party providers begin to release packages for Alpine. There's a way to have small Docker images using the standard distros like Ubuntu where you get to use your favorite packages. DockerSlim [1] was created for this. It collects the artifacts your are actually using in the container throwing everything else away... Here are a few numbers to give you an idea (using on Ubuntu 14 base image): node: 431MB -> 14MB python: 433MB -> 15MB ruby: 406 MB -> 14MB java: 743MB -> 100MB It's a work in progress, so there might be corner cases where it's less than ideal. It's not tested well enough with "fat" images. Pull Requests are greatly appreciated :-) You also get auto-generated Seccomp (already usable) and AppArmor (WIP) profiles, so you don't have to create them manually. [1] http://dockersl.im http://dockersl.im