Publish Alpine images to Dockerhub

[alexandv]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
It is currently difficult to add dynamic parameters to vmbackup (e.g. for the date). It is also difficult to debug issues with the other images because they are based on scratch and you cannot use kubectl exec to get a shell.

Describe the solution you'd like
In addition to (or in replacement of) the current images based on scratch can you publish images for all the components with Alpine as a base?

Describe alternatives you've considered
Build a Docker image locally and push to another registry but it adds some friction when a new version is released.

[valyala]

Switching base image from scratch to alpine increases the resulting image size. This goes in the opposite direction to https://medium.com/@valyala/stripping-dependency-bloat-in-victoriametrics-docker-image-983fb5912b0d :(

If you use Kubernetes 1.18 and newer versions, then it is possible to debug distroless containers with kubectl alpha debug - see https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/debug-running-pod/#ephemeral-container for details.

This is recurring feature request, so it is likely VictoriaMetrics Docker images will be switched from scratch to alpine base image in the near future. This should improve the overall user experience at the cost of slightly bigger Docker images.

In the mean time it is possble to build custom docker images on top of alpine or any other linux distro by passing the base distro image to ROOT_IMAGE env var during the build - see these docs for details.

[valyala]

@alexandv , the following commits switch base image for VictoriaMetrics components from scratch to alpine:

• Single-node version - ff624c9
• Cluster version - 2961e71

These commits will be included in the next release.

[alexandv]

That's great. Thanks @valyala for addressing this so quickly

[valyala]

FYI, all the VictoriaMetrics components are based on alpine docker image starting from v1.37.0. Closing this feature request as done.