distribution-spec VS jib

Back in 2013, a little company called Docker made it really easy to start using containers to package up applications. A big key to their success was the OCI (you can learn about that here), an industry wide initiative to have standards around how we package up our applications. Because of OCI standards, we have hundreds (maybe thousands?) of tools that can be combined to manage and deploy applications. So why aren’t we using this for packaging up Notebooks and AI models as well? It would make deploying, sharing, and managing our models easier for everyone involved.

Kubernetes on the backend used to utilize docker for much of its container runtime solutions. One of the modular features of Kubernetes is the ability to utilize a Container Runtime Interface or CRI. The problem was that Docker didn't really meet the spec properly and they had to maintain a shim to translate properly. Instead users could utilize the popular containerd or cri-o runtimes. These follow the Open Container Initiative or OCI's guidelines on container formats.

OCI stands for Open Container Initiative, and its goal as an organization is to define a specification for container formats and runtime.

https://opencontainers.org/

Here is Containerfile from the repo: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile

apko allows us to build OCI container images from .apk packages.

Flagger's load testing service can be installed via a Kustomization resource based on manifests packaged as an artifact in an Open Container Initiative (OCI) registry

CRI-O is a lightweight container runtime for Kubernetes. It is an implementation of Kubernetes CRI to use Open Container Initiative (OCI) compatible runtimes for running pods. It supports runc and Kata Containers as the container runtimes, but any OCI-compatible runtime can be integrated.

So somebody else created runj (runj is an experimental, proof-of-concept OCI-compatible runtime for FreeBSD jails.) https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj

You need to build Docker images for each app. This is specific to the JHipster application used in this tutorial which uses Jib to build the images. Make sure you are logged into Docker using docker login. Navigate to each app folder (store, invoice, product) and run the following command:

JIB

It is pretty easy to do with https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/jib.

Save yourself the dockerfile and use jib: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/jib/tree/master/jib-maven-plugin

I first learned about Distroless because it was the default option in Google's Jib. Jib is a Maven plugin to create Docker containers without dependency on Docker. Note that the default has changed now.

Optimize your Dockerfile by using a small base Java Image, use either Spring Boot's layers tools or Google Jib to build your docker file, and increase CPU/Memory requests and limits if you can.

In this section, we will setup the automated generation and deployment of a Docker container image. You will need a Docker Hub account and the Jib Gradle Plugin.

If you don't want to hack on your own scripts to package your app into a container, I can recommend the JIB maven plugin. A gradle version is also available.