Building better container images

Introduction

Many applications built today or modernized from monoliths are done so using microservice architectures. The microservice architecture makes applications easier to scale and faster to develop, which enables innovation and accelerating time-to-market for new features. In addition, microservices also provide lifecycle autonomy enabling applications to have independent build and deploy processes, which provides technological freedom such that they can be implemented in different programming languages and provide scaling flexibility to scale up or scale down independently based on workload utilization.

While microservices provide a lot of flexibility, the process of building and deploying them, ensuring the right application versions, and required dependencies are used is a tedious process. This is where containers come in.

Microservices can be packaged into a single lightweight and standalone executable artifact called container image that includes everything to run an …