distroless VS buildkit

Compare distroless vs buildkit and see what are their differences.

distroless

🥑 Language focused docker images, minus the operating system. (by GoogleContainerTools)

buildkit

concurrent, cache-efficient, and Dockerfile-agnostic builder toolkit (by moby)
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distroless buildkit
122 53
17,695 7,669
2.1% 1.9%
9.3 9.8
8 days ago about 20 hours ago
Starlark Go
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
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

Posts with mentions or reviews of distroless. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-14.
  • Chainguard Images now available on Docker Hub
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Mar 2024
    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
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Feb 2024
  • Using Alpine can make Python Docker builds 50× slower
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Dec 2023
    > 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
    1 project | /r/Clojure | 7 Dec 2023
  • Long Term Ownership of an Event-Driven System
    4 projects | dev.to | 2 Oct 2023
    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.
  • Minimizing Nuxt 3 Docker Images
    2 projects | dev.to | 5 Aug 2023
    # 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"]
  • Build Your Own Docker with Linux Namespaces, Cgroups, and Chroot
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jun 2023
    Lots of examples without the entire OS as other comments mention, an example would be Googles distroless[0]

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

  • Reddit temporarily ban subreddit and user advertising rival self-hosted platform (Lemmy)
    2 projects | /r/selfhosted | 7 Jun 2023
    Docker doesn't do this all the time. Distroless Docker containers are relatively common. https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless
  • Why elixir over Golang
    10 projects | /r/elixir | 29 May 2023
    Deployment: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless
  • Reviews
    3 projects | /r/golang | 17 May 2023
    Or use distroless image as it includes one, among others. https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless/blob/main/base/README.md

buildkit

Posts with mentions or reviews of buildkit. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-03.
  • ARM vs x86 em Docker
    1 project | dev.to | 5 Apr 2024
  • The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Dec 2023
    > We are uding docker-in-docker at the moment

    You can also run a "less privileged" container with all the features of Docker by using rootless buildkit in Kubernetes. Here are some examples:

    https://github.com/moby/buildkit/tree/master/examples/kubern...

    https://github.com/moby/buildkit/blob/master/examples/kubern...

    It's also possible to run dedicated buildkitd workers and connect to them remotely.

  • Show HN: Dockerfile Explorer
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Nov 2023
    - BuildOp evaluates its input as additional LLB operations to add to the graph to allow for dynamic build graphs (also unused in the Dockerfile frontend)

    With the Dockerfile Explorer, we run the Dockerfile frontend[1] that BuildKit uses inside of WASM to parse and produce the LLB output locally in your browser. We then embed the Monaco Editor so that you can change your Dockerfile to see how it impacts the LLB output that BuildKit will use to build your Docker image.

    You can see a quick video and read more details on how it all works here: https://depot.dev/blog/dockerfile-explorer.

    We'd love any feedback or ideas folks would like around this type of tool!

    [0] https://github.com/moby/buildkit#exploring-llb

  • macOS Containers v0.0.1
    24 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Sep 2023
  • Jenkins Agents On Kubernetes
    7 projects | dev.to | 4 Sep 2023
    Now since Kubernetes works off of containerd I'll be taking a different approach on handling container builds by using nerdctl and the buildkit that comes bundled with it. I'll do this on the amd64 control plane node since it's beefier than my Raspberry Pi workers for handling builds and build related services. Go ahead and download and unpack the latest nerdctl release as of writing (make sure to check the release page in case there's a new one):
  • Frequent Docker BuildKit cache misses with w/ multi-stage and docker-container
    1 project | /r/docker | 11 Jul 2023
    There's a 2-year-old moby/buildkit GitHub issue about frequent build cache misses when using the BuildKit docker-container driver and multi-stage builds. Anyone else in this sub run into this problem and/or have reasonable workarounds? It seems like something that should come up pretty often.
  • A Panic in BuildKit: an Open Source Journey
    1 project | /r/golang | 4 Jul 2023
    A couple months ago I encountered a bug in buildkit - when enabling OpenTelemetry tracing, we got occasional panics. With a bit of investigation, we found the cause, fixed and tested in our fork and internal deployments, and pushed to upstream.
  • Is it possible to copy files from a manifest in Dockerfile?
    1 project | /r/docker | 11 May 2023
    I do some search in the internet and there seems to be no good solution, so I just create a feature request: https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/3859
  • Cicada - CI/CD platform written with Rust
    2 projects | /r/rust | 25 Apr 2023
    Yeah, only Linux containers at the moment, BuildKit is the way we are constructing pipelines and doing caching. Split on if we will support non-linux hosts, but definitely want to find a good solution to not doing Docker-in-Docker.
  • Better support of Docker layer caching in Cargo
    2 projects | /r/rust | 30 Mar 2023
    Relevant issues are https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/3011 and https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/1512.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing distroless and buildkit you can also consider the following projects:

iron-alpine - Hardened alpine linux baseimage for Docker.

buildah - A tool that facilitates building OCI images.

spring-boot-jib - This project is about Containerizing a Spring Boot Application With Jib

kaniko - Build Container Images In Kubernetes

jib - 🏗 Build container images for your Java applications.

podman - Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods.

buildx - Docker CLI plugin for extended build capabilities with BuildKit

dockerfiles - Various Dockerfiles I use on the desktop and on servers.

docker-alpine - Official Alpine Linux Docker image. Win at minimalism!

nerdctl - contaiNERD CTL - Docker-compatible CLI for containerd, with support for Compose, Rootless, eStargz, OCIcrypt, IPFS, ...