For instance, a container with Liberica JRE 17 and musl-based Alpaquita Linux takes up only 40.56 MB - for most users, such image size reduction will already be enough to drastically lower Cloud resources consumption even without further adjustments. You can choose either JDK or JRE and a libc implementation (musl-perf or glibc) for the OS. BellSoft offers the developers a Liberica Runtime Container based on Liberica Lite - a lightweight Liberica JDK flavor optimal for Cloud deployment - and Alpaquita Linux. Some vendors provide base images with JDK and JRE. It has LTS releases with cost-efficient support and comes in two versions: one with optimized musl (musl perf) whose performance is equal to or superior to glibc, and the other with glibc. Find stock musl performance suboptimal for your applicationĬonsider using Alpaquita Linux.If you want to take advantage of lightweight Alpine Linux, but A detailed comparison of the best Linux distributions for Cloud and Server can be found in our previous article.īut as you can see, you can significantly reduce the Docker image by migrating to another OS.

Other important characteristics include available and affordable commercial support, LTS releases, security features, C library implementation, etc. Size is not the only factor - albeit quite a substantial one judging by the cost of Cloud resources - when selecting a Linux distribution. The structure of a typical Docker image can be depicted as follows: However, these two terms are often used interchangeably. Most Docker images start from a parent image rather than a base image. If the parent image is SCRATCH, then it is considered a base image. It refers to the contents of the FROM directive in the Dockerfile. We can update the bottom ones without touching the top to minimize traffic and accelerate update times.Īs per Docker documentation, a parent image is the one that your image is based on. Although we rarely change base layers, there are solutions for patching separate container layers.

A parent image and a base image form the bottom layers. The top layers with an application, its dependencies, and OS packages are the most frequently changed ones. The software in containers forms a stack. How to create a custom JDK container image based on Alpaquita Linuxīefore adjusting the container size, we must understand its structure.Microservices are called “micro” for a reason.

Java image size reduction