Chapter 8: Choosing the Container Base Image

The fastest and easiest way to learn about and get some experience with containers is to start working with pre-built container images, as we saw in the previous chapters. After a deep dive into container management, we discovered that sometimes, the available service, its configuration, or even the application version is not the one that our project requires. Then, we introduced Buildah and its feature for building custom container images. In this chapter, we are going to address another important topic that is often questioned in community and enterprise projects: the choice of a container base image.

Choosing the right container base image is an important task of the container journey: a container base image is the underlying operating system layer that our system's service, application, or code will rely on. Due to this, we should choose one that fits our best practices concerning security and updates.

In this chapter, we...