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ALPINE LINUX VERSIONS INSTALL

It means your servers will be ready to accept traffic at a faster rate. If you’re in a position where you have auto-scaling in place and are spinning up A LOT of servers then this is a pretty big deal. The slower your network is, the bigger the difference it will be. When pulling down new Docker images onto a fresh server, you can expect the initial pull to be quite a bit faster on Alpine. On the other hand, Alpine zipped through it in 3 seconds flat.

ALPINE LINUX VERSIONS APK

Time docker run -rm alpine sh -c 'apk update & apk add curl' Test 1: Downloading the Base Image on a Fresh Machine The second test will be the same as the above, except the system will already have the base Docker image on the machine before installing curl.

ALPINE LINUX VERSIONS INSTALL

The first test will be on a fresh box where I need to download the base Docker image onto the system using a 30MB home grade cable connection and install curl. How long would this take with Debian vs Alpine? Let’s say that you wanted to pull down a Docker image and install curl. The ~100MB savings is static regardless of what’s being built into your image.Ĭost isn’t the only win when dealing with smaller Docker images. In real world web applications which have lots of packages installed, I still see about a 2x or 3x savings in final image size with Alpine, so it’s not only useful in micro-benchmarks. I know you’re probably not operating at that scale (neither am I), but there is a real savings when it comes to transfer costs in the cloud at all levels of scale.īeing able to cut your image size down by over 100MB is a big deal. So just to transfer Debian vs Alpine ~35 million times at a cost of S3’s pricing calculator, there’s a difference of nearly $400,000 USD. At the very least, it puts things into perspective.Įstimated costs for transferring Debian and Alpine ~35 million times over S3: DISTRIBUTION By investigating its public API we can see that Debian has gotten 35,555,107 pulls and Alpine has gotten 135,136,475 pulls at the time of this article.Īre all of these pulls resulting in every byte transferred? Probably not, but your guess is as good as mine. The Docker Hub has handled a ton of pulls.

The Dockerized version of Alpine 3.6 weighs in at 3.98MB.įor comparison, here’s how Alpine compares to other popular distributions of Linux: DISTRIBUTION In most other contexts (such as doing laundry), “shrinkage” is a pretty bad thing, but in the world of Docker, you should look forward to it because it means your Docker images will be smaller. That sounds like it could be interesting, but what does that really mean for you and me, or anyone who uses Docker on a regular basis? Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox. What would cause such a move?īy the way, if you want, you can still use the Debian version of official Docker images today. Especially not when the previous official base image of choice was Debian – which is well known for being super solid. You don’t just wake up one morning and decide to make a sweeping change like that. This movement started near the beginning of 2016.įast forward to today and nearly every official Docker image has a tag for Alpine. It’s no secret by now that Docker is heavily using Alpine as a base image for official Docker images. Quick Jump: Why Alpine? | The Main Benefit Is Shrinkage | Alpine Is Fast | Alpine is Secure

Updated on June 20th, 2017 in #docker The 3 Biggest Wins When Using Alpine as a Base Docker Image If you want to shrink your Docker images, have your services start faster and be more secure then try Alpine out.

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