container.md

Alternatives to docker for building/managing containers

• containerd: use to run containers. containerd cannot be used to build images
• podman: similar to containerd
• buildah: used to build container

Best practices

• For graceful termination, use exec form, not shell form to ensure the termination signal is send to the correct process.
• Use distroless ¹ as alternative to alpine or scratch
• when running certain processes, use tmpfs in docker-compose to persist the data in memory. Could be used to speed up integration testing for postgres.

References

• https://docs.docker.com/develop/develop-images/dockerfile_best-practices/

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless ↩