Do not depend on images — you indispensable rely on!

In an infrastructure based on containers you surprise wise start depending on images. Which can become a real problem if they are not available.

Wherever you look there is this flagship “high availability” with which everyone advertises. With this self burdening promise comes also a responsibility. This is exactly where concepts like Kubernetes and CI/CD comes into play. These concepts allow us to serve better uptimes for our applications. Make our releases more error insusceptible.

All these solutions have something in common: Images

If you don’t build them from scratch, a typical snippet could look like this in your…

Not so long ago container virtualization wasn’t even a thing. Nowadays it’s hard to find a tutorial where Docker, Kubernetes and Co. aren’t mentioned. These tools got accepted and used by many in our open-source community. Based on this fact, we have seen a lot of improvement since then. I don’t need to list any single benefit container virtualization put into the game. Better let me try to compromise it into my own experience through these three words:

patterns, automation and reliability

Back to the (ch)roots

It all got started in 1979 where the concept of container virtualization was born. Within UNIX a so called system call chroot brought to light. It smoothed the first ways of providing an isolated disk space for processes. …

As I’m creating more and more microservices with Golang and having that inner feeling of improving everything (sometimes it’s a good habit and sometimes it gets in your own way). I felt like I have to do something on the general image size for my applications. So I started my research on how to get images smaller in the general term of best practices. A long time ago I already searched on that and improved a lot of things, but as always time has changed and maybe there is something interesting out there. My goals on reducing the image size are quite clear from the beginning. When it comes to microservices (which are running in Kubernetes in my case) I want to make them available very quickly. Sure when the image size is reduced it can be pulled a lot quicker. Another thing is that there are a lot of security concerns when you overload your image with unnecessary software tools. These tools are often times not even used. The more surface you offer the easier it gets to attack one of those. For example when you build your image with the standard Ubuntu image. In this image are tools shipped within that your application may not need. …