> I've never even understood the obsession with minimizing base image size In theory image size shouldn't matter because of Docker's caching. In practice, howe

> I've never even understood the obsession with minimizing base image size In theory image size shouldn't matter because of Docker's caching. In practice, however, many of the things we use around Docker (CI/CD, testing, orchestration and deployment tools...) don't take advantage of that cache. A GitLab CI stage to build my container will still pull the base image and build up from layer 1 every time. The subsequent testing stages will do the same with the final image. The deployment stage will also need to pull it first, just to push it to the registry again, but with a tag this time. The difference between the base image being a few dozen vs a few hundred megabytes translates directly into not just how much strain I'm putting on the network, but how long the pipeline takes. If I can reduce that by essentially just swapping the base image and search-replacing apt-get with apk, why not? Of course it isn't always that simple, but for most things where you're just something like Node or Python with minimal native extensions, it's definitely worth it.