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Minifying container images with DockerSlim
Dieting
Although not always the first choice, Docker Engine will be used extensively as the default container runtime in Kubernetes and OpenShift on cloud-native infrastructure for some time to come. So, what would you say if I told you that you could automatically reduce the size of your Docker images 30x? Why are smaller container images a good thing? When it comes to containers, less is more: Your containers start quicker, they contain fewer security threats and bugs, they take up less storage, and they take less time to download and upgrade. In other words, it's a really good idea to keep your container images trim.
A sophisticated piece of open source software allows you to do just that; it's called DockerSlim [1]. The clever tool also makes a welcome foray into further securing your container images. The DockerSlim docs declare: "Don't change anything in your Docker container image and minify it by up to 30x (and for compiled languages even more) making it secure too!"
As well as clear and useful docs in the GitHub page README file, you'll also appreciate the slick introduction on a single-page website [2] that has a simple and effective example (before pointing you back to the GitHub repository again). There, you'll also find a useful video that runs through some command-line options to get you started.
In this article, I look at how to automate the slimming of your container images and how to start tweaking the security profiles of your containers, as well.
Trimming the Fat
Before looking at how to get DockerSlim working, I'll show you a few examples on how trim you can expect certain container images to become. The GitHub page has some eye-watering benchmarks that you might expect to achieve with a number of languages. The Python examples in
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