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> I keep hearing this, but in years of shipping Alpine based images into prod the problems never materialized. DNS was the big one; for many years musl's imple
by dharmab 3y ago
> I keep hearing this, but in years of shipping Alpine based images into prod the problems never materialized.
DNS was the big one; for many years musl's implementation of DNS was both divergent from glibc, and in some cases, broken due to lack of TCP support. This only got fixed earlier this year: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/tsc/-/issues/43 https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/tsc/-/issues/43
TCP support can be a really big deal for reliability at very large scales. When I led the container infrastructure team at $BIGTECHCOMPANY we eventually published a recommendation against using Alpine because musl's resolver was demonstrably less reliable than glibc's- we had the production data to show it.
The other case was when developers copied binaries compiled for glibc into alpine containers, which is user error to be fair, but it was easier to tell everyone to use glibc instead of teaching thousands of Python devs about how the compiler and linker works ;_;