I've been losing trust in Bitnami lately and I'm looking for some minimal, Debian-based images that can take the place of minideb. Even though minideb isn't disappearing anytime soon, I just can't rely on it anymore. Are there any good drop-in replacements, forks, or similar images that offer truly FOSS-based options, especially for use in devcontainers?
5 Answers
We’ve started using Echo vulnerability-free base images. They’re Debian-based, so they integrate well. So far, it’s been great!
I've been using debian-slim, and it's fantastic! However, it’s not a direct drop-in replacement for minideb since you'd need to rewrite your existing images.
We're in a similar situation with Helm charts. For now, we're retagging and pushing everything to our private registry. But here are some options you might consider: Alpine or forking the minideb repo for self-maintenance. It's not too complicated!
You might want to look at minideb:bookworm (38 MB) versus debian:bookworm-slim (27 MB). Just use Debian-slim; it’s well-maintained and small enough. Plus, the layers get reused, so a bigger image isn't going to slow you down significantly. Not sure why everyone's fixated on making them tiny—just go with distroless if that's the case!
Why not just use the official Debian images? Relying on random third-party base images might be part of why you feel this way about Bitnami. Stick to the official stuff for more reliability!
That's a valid point. Bitnami was a well-known provider, but I see where you're coming from.
Where can I grab those Echo images? I'm really interested!