Now that the official Ubuntu containers have gotten down to around 50MB for an image [1], can the case still be made for using Alpine?<p>Admittedly, Alpine images are just 2MB [2], but I kept running into so many edge cases with musl, apk didn't always have the packages I wanted and often lagged behind critical security updates, and documentation/community was much smaller than I'd like. It's a genuine question. I'm wondering if the case can be made to prefer Alpine as your default Docker base image.<p>[1] <a href="https://hub.docker.com/r/library/ubuntu/tags/" rel="nofollow">https://hub.docker.com/r/library/ubuntu/tags/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://hub.docker.com/r/library/alpine/tags/" rel="nofollow">https://hub.docker.com/r/library/alpine/tags/</a>
Alpine Linux is great and I wish they would do more to upstream their build fixes so that stuff works out of the box with musl. I also wish Rust and then rustup will work out of the box on Alpine soon, as this will make it very easy to use generally and in docker images for ci specifically. No complaints, just a small wish list for a distro that's already very useful. Huge thanks to all alpine devs!
Alpine Linux is the easiest/quickest way to create containers that have a manageable size (which is pretty important if you are hosting your own registery that charges you for space instead of containers)