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I recently created a presentation about lean containers: http://www.slideshare.net/KuanYenHeng/docker-on-a-diet http://www.slideshare.net/KuanYenHeng/docker-on

I recently created a presentation about lean containers: http://www.slideshare.net/KuanYenHeng/docker-on-a-diet http://www.slideshare.net/KuanYenHeng/docker-on-a-diet If you need a tiny base image with a decent package index, try Alpine Linux.

mdaniel 12y ago
I, too, read a blog talking about the joys of Alpine Linux but just be forewarned that you'll need to test the hell out of you app and be prepared to chase some weird behavior. It's libc and/or python are not the ones you know and love. I am certain there are great use-cases for this, but it seems the discussions imply that "change your FROM, save a ton of disk space" but there is more to that story.
- knite 12y ago
  I started using Alpine a couple of weeks ago. Really curious what sorts of problems you've encountered. The only big one for me so far is the change to DNS resolution.
  - mdaniel 12y ago
    I was using it for hosting a Scrapy spider, which is Python 2.7 using twisted and a whole host of cryptography native libs (that I compiled against Alpine, I'm just listing them to provide the situation for the issue). The requests would leave the machine, but it seemed none of the handlers were firing with the result. I thought, ok, perhaps I've made a configuration mistake or the target website is acting funny. After 3 hours of inserting every kind of debugging print and log statement I could think of, I decided to sanity check the setup using debian:wheezy. As my post above implied, it worked immediately and flawlessly. Thus: it may work great for you, but ensure their libraries and binaries are a good fit for your situation. I did see quite a few other comments discussing Python, Ruby and other not-easily-statically-compilable stacks may not be a good fit for the system the article was proposing, so this may not strictly be Alpine's fault. It's just when I see a discussion of the great savings from using Alpine, I feel it's important to remind folks there is no free lunch.
    - Gigablah 12y ago
      That's true. In my case I had plenty of tests for my application (that I ran inside the container environment) so I felt safe to proceed.

mdaniel 12y ago

I, too, read a blog talking about the joys of Alpine Linux but just be forewarned that you'll need to test the hell out of you app and be prepared to chase some weird behavior. It's libc and/or python are not the ones you know and love. I am certain there are great use-cases for this, but it seems the discussions imply that "change your FROM, save a ton of disk space" but there is more to that story.

knite 12y ago
I started using Alpine a couple of weeks ago. Really curious what sorts of problems you've encountered. The only big one for me so far is the change to DNS resolution.
- mdaniel 12y ago
  I was using it for hosting a Scrapy spider, which is Python 2.7 using twisted and a whole host of cryptography native libs (that I compiled against Alpine, I'm just listing them to provide the situation for the issue). The requests would leave the machine, but it seemed none of the handlers were firing with the result. I thought, ok, perhaps I've made a configuration mistake or the target website is acting funny. After 3 hours of inserting every kind of debugging print and log statement I could think of, I decided to sanity check the setup using debian:wheezy. As my post above implied, it worked immediately and flawlessly. Thus: it may work great for you, but ensure their libraries and binaries are a good fit for your situation. I did see quite a few other comments discussing Python, Ruby and other not-easily-statically-compilable stacks may not be a good fit for the system the article was proposing, so this may not strictly be Alpine's fault. It's just when I see a discussion of the great savings from using Alpine, I feel it's important to remind folks there is no free lunch.
  - Gigablah 12y ago
    That's true. In my case I had plenty of tests for my application (that I ran inside the container environment) so I felt safe to proceed.