The Fallacy of Complacent Distroless Containers | by Cristovao Cordeiro | Jan, 2025

Making containers smaller is the preferred observe when lowering your assault floor. However how actual is that this sense of safety?

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Constructing Docker photos is an straightforward and accessible observe, nevertheless, perfecting them continues to be an artwork that’s difficult to grasp. In pursuit of the smallest, most safe and but useful container photos, builders face themselves with distroless practices that often contain advanced tooling, deep distro information and error-prone trimming methods. Actually, such practices typically neglect the usage of bundle managers, contributing to a safety abyss, as most vulnerability scanners depend on bundle supervisor metadata to detect the software program parts inside the container picture.

If you construct a container picture, you’re packaging your utility, along with its dependencies, in a transportable software program unit that may later be deployed in isolation, with out the necessity to virtualize a whole working system.

Constructing container photos is definitely a really accessible observe these days. There’s an abundance of instruments (e.g. Docker, Rockcraft, Buildah…) particularly for that objective.