distroless
apko
distroless | apko | |
---|---|---|
122 | 14 | |
17,749 | 1,060 | |
1.2% | 5.2% | |
9.4 | 9.4 | |
8 days ago | 4 days ago | |
Starlark | Go | |
Apache License 2.0 | Apache License 2.0 |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
distroless
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Chainguard Images now available on Docker Hub
lots of questions here regarding what this product is. I guess i can provide some information for the context, from a perspective of an outside contributor.
Chainguard Images is a set of hardened container images.
They were built by the original team that brought you Google's Distroless (https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless)
However, there were few problems with Distroless:
1. distroless were based on Debian - which in turn, limited to Debian's release cadence for fixing CVE.
2. distroless is using bazelbuild, which is not exactly easy to contrib, customize, etc...
3. distroless images are hard to extend.
Chainguard built a new "undistro" OS for container workload, named Wolfi, using their OSS projects like melange (for packaging pkgs) and apko (for building images).
The idea is (from my understanding) is that
1. You don't have to rely on upstream to cut a release. Chainguard will be doing that, with lots of automation & guardrails in placed. This allow them to fix vulnerabilties extremely fast.
- Language focused Docker images, minus the operating system
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Using Alpine can make Python Docker builds 50× slower
> If you have one image based on Ubuntu in your stack, you may as well base them all on Ubuntu, because you only need to download (and store!) the common base image once
This is only true if your infrastructure is static. If your infrastructure is highly elastic, image size has an impact on your time to scale up.
Of course, there are better choices than Alpine to optimize image size. Distroless (https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless) is a good example.
- Smaller and Safer Clojure Containers: Minimizing the Software Bill of Materials
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Long Term Ownership of an Event-Driven System
The same as our code dependencies, container updates can include security patches and bug fixes and improvements. However, they can also include breaking changes and it is crucial you test them thoroughly before putting them into production. Wherever possible, I recommend using the distroless base image which will drastically reduce both your image size, your risk vector, and therefore your maintenance version going forward.
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Minimizing Nuxt 3 Docker Images
# Use a large Node.js base image to build the application and name it "build" FROM node:18-alpine as build WORKDIR /app # Copy the package.json and package-lock.json files into the working directory before copying the rest of the files # This will cache the dependencies and speed up subsequent builds if the dependencies don't change COPY package*.json /app # You might want to use yarn or pnpm instead RUN npm install COPY . /app RUN npm run build # Instead of using a node:18-alpine image, we are using a distroless image. These are provided by google: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless FROM gcr.io/distroless/nodejs:18 as prod WORKDIR /app # Copy the built application from the "build" image into the "prod" image COPY --from=build /app/.output /app/.output # Since this image only contains node.js, we do not need to specify the node command and simply pass the path to the index.mjs file! CMD ["/app/.output/server/index.mjs"]
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Build Your Own Docker with Linux Namespaces, Cgroups, and Chroot
Lots of examples without the entire OS as other comments mention, an example would be Googles distroless[0]
[0]: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless
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Reddit temporarily ban subreddit and user advertising rival self-hosted platform (Lemmy)
Docker doesn't do this all the time. Distroless Docker containers are relatively common. https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless
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Why elixir over Golang
Deployment: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless
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Reviews
Or use distroless image as it includes one, among others. https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless/blob/main/base/README.md
apko
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Distroless images using melange and apko
apko allows us to build OCI container images from .apk packages.
- Build OCI images from APK packages directly without Dockerfile
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Docker Is Four Things
We have built something very similar to what you are describing: https://github.com/chainguard-dev/apko
- Apko: APK-based OCI image builder
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Tool to build Docker images
apko
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An Overview of Kubernetes Security Projects at KubeCon Europe 2023
Chainguard also appears to have several open source projects.The most popular one is apko, used for building OCI images from APK packages.
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aws-cli v2: how much smaller can it get? Answer: a lot smaller :)
Once those are done, I just need to build aws-cli package, put those APK files in a final image with Chainguard's apko.
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Crafting container images without Dockerfiles
This is one of my absolute favorite topics. Pardon me while I rant and self-promote :D
Dockerfiles are great for flexibility, and have been a critical contributor to the adoption of Docker containers. It's very easy to take a base image, add a thing to it, and publish your version.
Unfortunately Dockerfiles are also full of gotchas and opaque cargo-culted best practices to avoid them. Being an open-ended execution environment, it's basically impossible to tell even during the build what's being added to the image, which has downstream implications for anybody trying to get an SBOM from the image for example.
Instead, I contribute to a number of tools to build and manage images without Dockerfiles. Each of them are less featureful than Dockerfiles, but being more constrained in what they can do, you can get a lot more visibility into what they're doing, since they're not able to do "whatever the user wants".
1. https://github.com/google/go-containerregistry is a Go module to interact with images in the registry and in tarballs and layouts, in the local docker daemon. You can append layers, squash layers, modify metadata, etc.
2. crane is a CLI that uses the above (in the same repo) to make many of the same modifications from the commandline. `crane append` for instance adds a layer containing some contents to an image, entirely in the registry, without even pulling the base image.
3. ko (https://ko.build) is a tool to build Go applications into images without Dockerfiles or Docker at all. It runs `go build`, appends that binary on top of a base image, and pushes it directly to the registry. It generates an SBOM declaring what Go modules went into the app it put into the image, since that's all it can do.
4. apko (https://apko.dev) is a tool to assemble an image from pre-built apks, without Docker. It's capable of producing "distroless" images easily with config in YAML. It generates an SBOM declaring exactly what apks it put in the image, since that's all it can do.
Bazel's rules_docker is another contender in the space, and GCP's distroless images use it to place Debian .debs into an image. Apko is its spiritual successor, and uses YAML instead of Bazel's own config language, which makes it a lot easier to adopt and use (IMO), with all of the same benefits.
I'm excited to see more folks realizing that Dockerfiles aren't always necessary, and can sometimes make your life harder. I'm extra excited to see more tools and tutorials digging into the details of how container images work, and preaching the gospel that they can be built and modified using existing tooling and relatively simple libraries. Excellent article!
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Vulnerability scanner written in Go that uses osv.dev data
Depends exactly what you're trying to create it for. I advocate for doing it during the build process rather than as a step after.
We open sourced a few tools that do it automatically for containers:
https://github.com/chainguard-dev/apko
https://github.com/chainguard-dev/melange
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Apko: A Better Way To Build Containers?
apko takes apk packages and builds them into OCI images (aka Docker images). Sounds quite simple, because it is:
What are some alternatives?
iron-alpine - Hardened alpine linux baseimage for Docker.
docker-pushmi-pullyu - Copy Docker images directly to a remote host without using Docker Hub or a hosted registry.
spring-boot-jib - This project is about Containerizing a Spring Boot Application With Jib
containerd - An open and reliable container runtime
jib - 🏗 Build container images for your Java applications.
melange - build APKs from source code
podman - Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods.
osv-scanner - Vulnerability scanner written in Go which uses the data provided by https://osv.dev
dockerfiles - Various Dockerfiles I use on the desktop and on servers.
nerdctl - contaiNERD CTL - Docker-compatible CLI for containerd, with support for Compose, Rootless, eStargz, OCIcrypt, IPFS, ...
docker-alpine - Official Alpine Linux Docker image. Win at minimalism!
gvisor - Application Kernel for Containers