I still like minimizing container image sizes for the security and performance benefits. It's just not a strong enough reason to choose a different linux distro

I still like minimizing container image sizes for the security and performance benefits. It's just not a strong enough reason to choose a different linux distro for your production environment. In other words, switching to alpine is the wrong approach to achieve smaller image sizes. Unlike the early days of Docker, today you see popular distros provides multiple official image flavors depends on how minimal you are comfortable with. Or you can go even further with things like Google distroless, or even just scratch. I rarely see negative consequences when it's done appropriately. In fact, we see a lot of benefits by doing this. for instance, developers now understand their own app's dependencies much better ("oh your python app is having a cert error? does it come with its own cert bundle, use 3rd party package like certifi, ca-certificates from OS package manager, or a combination of some of them?" It's much easier to answer this question now than before) Package only the stuff your app needs.