Broadly, CNBs are designed to intelligently turn sourcecode into images. The idea of buildpacks isn't new, Heroku pioneered it and it was picked up in other pla

Broadly, CNBs are designed to intelligently turn sourcecode into images. The idea of buildpacks isn't new, Heroku pioneered it and it was picked up in other places too. What's new is taking full advantage of the OCI image and registry standards. For example, a buildpack can determine that a layer doesn't need to be rebuilt and just skip it. Or it can replace a layer. It can do this without triggering rebuilds of other layers. Finally, when updating an image in a registry, buildpacks can perform "layer rebasing", creating new images by stamping out a definition with a changed layer. If all your images are built with buildpacks, you reduce hours of docker builds to a few seconds of API calls. This is a bit of a word soup, so I'll point you to https://buildpacks.io/ https://buildpacks.io/ for more.