VSHN.timer #40: Productive Containers

Welcome to another VSHN.timer! Every Monday, 5 links related to Kubernetes, OpenShift, CI / CD, and DevOps; all stuff coming out of our own chat system, making us think, laugh, or simply work better.

This week we’re going to talk about how to create better, faster, smaller containers for the cloud applications you deploy every day (or even better, several times a day!)

1. As containers reach the „plateau of productivity“ in the hype cycle, developers are more and more interested in making their applications leaner and faster. Jérôme Petazzoni wrote an incredible series of three articles (a joy to read) explaining all one needs to know to make our containers smaller. And when he says smaller, he means it; something like 99.9% smaller! Recommended to beginners and experts alike.

https://www.ardanlabs.com/blog/2020/02/docker-images-part1-reducing-image-size.html

2. Guillaume Grossetie, busy cranking out new versions of the awesome Kroki, applied all the tips and tricks proposed by Jérôme (and many others) and documented the whole process, including lots of useful links.

https://blog.yuzutech.fr/blog/minimal-docker-containers/

3. By this time most of the readers of this series are probably building their containers with Podman exclusively, or at least have added a line reading alias docker=podman to their dotfiles. Either way you might be interested in the inner workings of rootless Podman builds combined with Buildah, including networking and storage requirements usually only available to processes running with higher privileges.

https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/behind-scenes-podman

4. Sometimes Kubernetes is „too much;“ in those cases, Docker Compose is the usual simpler alternative to „orchestrate“ containers. If that’s your case, you might find the Docker Compose Package Manager a handy tool to share your configurations in other contexts, or with other users.

5. The tool of the week is Paketo Buildpacks, a CNCF sandbox project started by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. It provides a high-level abstraction to create container images, with ready-to-use language packages for popular stacks such as .NET, Java, Go or Node.js.

https://paketo.io/

Do you care about the size of your containers? Do you use Podman instead of Docker? Do you have any other tips you would like to share with the community? Get in touch with us through the form at the bottom of this page, and see you next week for another edition of VSHN.timer.