dive VS buildkit

Dive is an open-source tool that allows you to explore the various layers of a Docker image. It shows you the content of each layer and helps you identify voluminous or unnecessary parts.

Dive is a great tool for debugging this. I like image reduction work just because it gives me a chance to play with Dive: https://github.com/wagoodman/dive

One easy low hanging fruit I see a LOT for ballooning image sizes is people including the kitchen sink SDK/CLI for their cloud provider (like AWS or GCP), when they really only need 1/100 of that. The full versions of both of these tools are several hundred mb each

This post is going to be shorter. I'd like to highlight a tool that I really enjoy working with called "Dive" It is an essential tool when working to build and optimize docker containers.

Whether you work with Docker regularly or even create your own Docker containers, Dive is a great tool for streamlining image sizes, potentially helping you save storage costs and speed up deployments.

> 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.

- 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

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):

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 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.

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

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.

Relevant issues are https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/3011 and https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/1512.