gRPC VS apko

That's not true at all. Case in point In general, this is not a problem that AGC can solve. The language can help (something Java is admittedly particularly bad at) but even so, there'll always be avenues for leaks. That's just the nature of shared things. Interestingly, in the linked grpc case, the leaked memory is only half the problem -- AGC doesn't help at all with the leaked HTTP2 connection.

I've trialled my new image with an existing project via JLink that's heavy on Netty and gRPC the image works great (with a small tweak to exclude grpc-netty-shaded due to grpc-java#9083).

When developing an application, the vast majority of code is written by other people. We import that code and make use of it to get whatever we need done. In this case, the developer of an various android applications are using grpc-java.

`proto_library` for building the `.bin` file from protos works great. Generating stubs/messages for "all" languages does not. Each language does not want to implement gRPC rules, the gRPC team does not want to implement rules for each language. Sort of a deadlock situation. For example:

- C++: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/cc_grpc_libra...

- Python: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/python_rules....

- ObjC: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/objc_grpc_lib...

- Java: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/blob/master/java_grpc_libr...

- Go (different semantics than all of the other): https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_go/blob/master/proto/def...

But there's also no real cohesion within the community. The biggest effort to date has been in https://github.com/stackb/rules_proto which integrates with gazelle.

tl;dr: Low alignment results in diverging implementations that are complicated to understand for newcomers. Buff's approach is much more appealing as it's a "this is the one way to do the right thing" and having it just work by detecting `proto_library` and doing all of the linting/registry stuff automagically in CI would be fantastic.

Small clarification (to my understanding, I'm not a Java Guru) on why Java got on top - those Java implementations use something called Direct Executor. It's super performant when there's no chance of a blocking operation. But if you are to do anything more than echo service, you might be in trouble. Other implementations probably don't suffer from the same constraint. The related discussion can be found in this PR.

clone https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java

If you do streaming then the best option would be to use a so called manual flow control. You can find an example here.

Another interesting link is their official grpc-java benchmarks project, which is also used in the benchmark I've posted you.

Both JLink (gRPC#3522) and Graal have some issues; I'm especially concerned about the Serial GC in Graal so will be putting that under some stress soon to see if that confirms my suspicions. I'll also be good when some Java 16 JRE Alpine images appear as the JDK is too bloaty.

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

We have built something very similar to what you are describing: https://github.com/chainguard-dev/apko

apko

Chainguard also appears to have several open source projects.The most popular one is apko, used for building OCI images from APK packages.

Once those are done, I just need to build aws-cli package, put those APK files in a final image with Chainguard's apko.

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!

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

apko takes apk packages and builds them into OCI images (aka Docker images). Sounds quite simple, because it is: