> I let it take care of downloading the jdk, gradle/mvn, and then let it download the world as a separate docker layer before letting it build the software. In

> I let it take care of downloading the jdk, gradle/mvn, and then let it download the world as a separate docker layer before letting it build the software. Including your source code inside your Docker image unnecessarily inflates the size of your Docker image, including (seemingly from your description) the entire version control history. For big projects (especially big projects where junior engineers didn't get the memo that you shouldn't check binary files into Git...), this can easily add hundreds of megabytes if not gigabytes to the size of the image. Docker isn't a build system (which is responsible for the creation of both inflated-but-easily-debuggable as well as optimized-for-production), it's a combined packaging system and runtime.