stargz-snapshotter VS distroless

A lazy chunked delivery strategy like used in the k8s stargz-snapshotter[0] project could be effective here, where it only pulls chunks as needed, but it would probably require wasm platform changes.

[0] https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter

To optimize build speed, cache hits, and registry storage, we're building each image reproducibly and indexing the contents with eStargz[0]. The image is stored on Cloudflare R2, and served via a Cloudflare Worker. Everything is open source[1]!

Compared to alternatives like `git lfs clone` or downloading your model at runtime, embedding it with `COPY` produces layers that are cache-stable, with identical hash digests across rebuilds. This means they can be fully cached, even if your base image or source code changes.

And for Docker builders that enable eStargz, copying single files from the image will download only the requested files. eStargz can be enabled in a variety of image builders[2], and we’ve enabled it by default on Depot[3].

Here’s an announcement post with more details: https://depot.dev/blog/depot-ai.

We’d love to hear any feedback you may have!

[0] https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter/blob/main/docs/estargz.md

[1] https://github.com/depot/depot.ai

[2] https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter/blob/main/docs/integration.md#image-builders

[3] https://depot.dev

Seekable OCI (SOCI) is a technology open-sourced by AWS that enables containers to launch faster by lazily loading the container image. It’s usually not possible to fetch individual files from gzipped tar files. With SOCI, AWS borrowed some of the design principles from stargz-snapshotter, but took a different approach. A SOCI index is generated separately from the container image and is stored in the registry as an OCI Artifact and linked back to the container image by OCI Reference Types. This means that the container images do not need to be converted, image digests do not change, and image signatures remain valid.

This is interesting and seems general purpose. Not merely for container images.

There’s this option for OCI containers which I don’t pretend to understand: https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter

It is used by containerd and nerdctl. You do have to build the image with it. Images work in OCI compatible registry. By fetching most used files first container can be started before loading is finished. Or so I gather.

stargz is a gamechanger for startup time. You might not need to care about image size at all

kubernetes and podmand support it, and docker support is likely coming. It lazy loads the filesystem on start-up, making network requests for things that are needed and therefore can often start up large images very fast.

https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter

containerd/stargz-snapshotter: Fast container image distribution plugin with lazy pulling (github.com)

Yes, see https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter

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