It sounds like a buildpack identifies a common case of what someone might be doing in a container / Dockerfile, and standardizes it to remove the arbitrary vari

It sounds like a buildpack identifies a common case of what someone might be doing in a container / Dockerfile, and standardizes it to remove the arbitrary variation that inevitably occurs when lots of people are independently solving exactly the same problem. For example, the patch level of the OS is directly or indirectly specified in the Dockerfile, but generally doesn’t actually matter to the application. If your use case fits into a scenario which is handled by an existing buildpack, then the claim is that you’ll be better off using the buildpack because the infrastructure can make optimizations that can’t be made with arbitrary containers. If your use case isn’t covered by a buildpack, then you can either (1) make a buildpack or (2) revert to raw containers. (Although your platform may not allow (2)).