As of what I can see the docker images available for CrateDB are run on Centos 7. This adds about 70MB to the docker image size compared to if it were to be run on the more commonly used linux distro Alpine. So my question is if there are any plans to support alpine as the base OS for your docker images?
1 Like
We had several issues in the past when using Alpine as a base image. See Base Crate Docker image from CentOS 7, not Alpine · crate/docker-crate@b1289dd · GitHub and Base Crate Docker image from CentOS 7, not Alpine · crate/docker-crate@d589021 · GitHub and I think also aarch64 related ones.
We have decided that the smaller image size does not justify the effort we’d have to put in (initial effort, long-time maintenance, etc).
So currently there is no plan from our side to switch back to Alpine but of course we’re happy of any contribution in that direction if possible and not resulting in these issues again.
3 Likes
Dear Anton,
thank you for writing in. In order to support what Sebastian was explaining here and to give you more context about why it is a bad idea to follow the Alpine trail in all occasions, let me reference my comment Consider using openjdk:8-jre-alpine as base image · Issue #144 · crate/docker-crate · GitHub here, where I tried to elaborate a bit more about this topic:
Because many people have been tripped by subtle behavioral changes when using musl libc, I believe a significant amount of people already moved away from Alpine Linux again, at least for this very purpose of only squeezing some bytes from absolute Docker image sizes.
However, please let us know if you believe we can improve the situation by considering to use a different glibc-based operating system, similar to what @NinjaTycoon suggested at Consider using openjdk:8-jre-alpine as base image · Issue #144 · crate/docker-crate · GitHub :
With kind regards,
Andreas.
1 Like