You can however compose micro services with scratch For example I created a cntlm base image (linked in another comment) From there I can do FROM my_base_ima

You can however compose micro services with scratch For example I created a cntlm base image (linked in another comment) From there I can do FROM my_base_image COPY whatever and then add layers of services first one is proxy second one could be queue service (for example http://nsq.io http://nsq.io) then a message server, that just sends notifications etc. etc. etc. The same could be achieved downloading and configuring the static binaries, but Docker packaging, security and network separation makes evrything a little bit easier