distroless VS bocker

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.

> 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.

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.

# 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"]

Lots of examples without the entire OS as other comments mention, an example would be Googles distroless[0]

[0]: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless

Docker doesn't do this all the time. Distroless Docker containers are relatively common. https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless

Deployment: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless

Or use distroless image as it includes one, among others. https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless/blob/main/base/README.md

A (joke?) one-liner I came up with while thinking about solutions to centralized container management across multiple SSH hosts. Shame on me.

The name is inspired by bocker [0], albeit this doesn't re-implement docker-compose in bash, I found it to be fitting enough.

I'd love to see someone come up with a smarter and/or shorter way to do this.

[0] https://github.com/p8952/bocker

When I did a talk about docker I also wanted to show a bit of what it does under the hood without going through all the layers and without too much details. This ~120 lines of shell script is really good in providing just an intro into what's needed for containers: https://github.com/p8952/bocker/blob/master/bocker

i tried it and like the concnpt, but until it can be launched via a systemd userspace service (without previously manually booting it) among other problems i will keep using docker (or bocker)

> But you couldn't reimplement podman in a few hundred lines of code.

You don't even need a few hundred: https://github.com/p8952/bocker

And then there's 'dokku' which IIRC, started as a bash version of Heroku.

> Not all ideas have the same quality.

They really do. I've heard all kinds of things in my career, but almost none I would want to dedicate a portion of my life building. Not because they are bad ideas or won't work, but because of the person with the idea or it just didn't interest me. Those people went on to be moderately successful (like hundreds of millions worth) but I'm glad I wasn't on that ride.

Bocker is in this same category...docker clone in bash that's helpful in seeing what's really happening underneath with nsenter, namespaces, network bridging, cgroups, etc.

https://github.com/p8952/bocker

Docker implemented in around 100 lines of bash: https://github.com/p8952/bocker

This is the most mindblowing example for enterprise security teams that think Docker is a new threat on a single tenant Linux host.

No, buddies, all this stuff is already there. If you were fine with your visibility before*, you're still fine. Go find a real problem while we play with our developer dopamine.

* NARRATOR: They shouldn't have been.

Bocker[1] does a reasonably good job of showing the value of Docker was mostly in Docker hub.

[1] https://github.com/p8952/bocker

There is a cool project I've seen called "bocker" (https://github.com/p8952/bocker) which is something of a proof of concept of implementing Docker with bash, which speaks a bit to how Docker is indeed in many ways an amalgam of lower level primitives (such as chroot as you mentioned). Pretty neat!