community VS nodejs

A list of adopters (many of which are hosting providers) is here: https://github.com/buildpacks/community/blob/main/ADOPTERS.m...

Many comments here point out how difficult it is to manage a separate dependency stack for each container when you use Dockerfiles to build them. This problem is just as difficult, time-intensive, and security-critical for microservice apps running on K8s as it is for CLI tools and graphical apps.

Worth pointing out that there is an incubating CNCF project that tries to solve this problem by forgoing Dockerfiles entirely: Cloud Native Buildpacks (https://buildpacks.io)

CNB defines safe seams between OCI image layers so that can be replaced out of order, directly on any Docker registry (only JSON requests), and en-mass. This means you can, e.g., instantly update all of your OS packages for your 1000+ containers without running any builds, as long as you use an LTS distribution with strong ABI promises (e.g., Ubuntu 20.04). Most major cloud vendors have quietly adopted it, especially for function builds: https://github.com/buildpacks/community/blob/main/ADOPTERS.m...

You might recognize "buildpacks" from Heroku, and in fact the project was started several years ago in the CNCF by the folks who maintained the Heroku and Cloud Foundry buildpacks in the pre-Dockerfile era.

[Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of the project, on the VMware (formerly Cloud Foundry) side.]

This is especially true of Paketo's buildpacks, which tend to do exactly one thing each. E.g., Paketo Node.js buildpack is just a configuration file that's composed of other buildpacks: https://github.com/paketo-buildpacks/nodejs/blob/main/buildp...