.NET offers a variety of deployment options for applications, which pair with container images that we offer. It's possible to produce very small container images. This document summarizes the available options to help you make the best choice for your apps and environment.
All images were produced from the "releasesapi" sample using Ubuntu 22.04 ("jammy") images for amd64. Alpine images will be similar. The Baseline image is a standard framework-dependent deployment on the ASP.NET runtime image. This is the largest image with the most functionality and flexibility. However, the new Ubuntu Chiseled .NET base images can provide significantly smaller and more secure deployments for your application as demonstrated below.
Note
The recorded image sizes are a snapshot of deployment sizes at the time of .NET 8.0 GA. Image sizes will fluctuate over time due to base image updates and updated package installations. This document will not be updated over time. The key takeaway is the size difference between the different models.
| Image Kind | Base Image | Uncompressed Image Size | Compressed Image Size | % Size Savings Over Baseline1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline | aspnet:8.0-jammy |
217 MB | 90.9 MB | |
| Chiseled | aspnet:8.0-jammy-chiseled |
111 MB | 49.3 MB | 46% |
| Chiseled + ASP.NET Composite Runtime | aspnet:8.0-jammy-chiseled-composite |
103 MB | 40.8 MB | 55% |
Self-contained deployments bundle the .NET Runtime with your app so that it's able to run without the full .NET Runtime installed. IL Trimming for self-contained apps removes unused code from the .NET Runtime and libraries to reduce application size. And Native AOT deployment produces an app that is completely compiled to native code at build time for the smallest deployment size that .NET allows for.
| Image Kind | Base Image | Uncompressed Image Size | Compressed Image Size | % Size Savings Over Baseline1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self-contained + Trimming | runtime-deps:8.0-jammy |
146 MB | 57.9 MB | 36% |
| Chiseled + Self-contained + Trimming | runtime-deps:8.0-jammy-chiseled |
39.3 MB | 16.4 MB | 82% |
| Native AOT | runtime-deps:8.0-jammy-chiseled |
27.7 MB | 12.4 MB | 86% |
| Native AOT (preview image)2 | runtime-deps:8.0-jammy-chiseled-aot |
25.4 MB | 11.6 MB | 87% |
For more information about new images for .NET 8, please see the .NET image variants documentation (temporary link to PR) and "Announcement: New approach for differentiating .NET 8+ images".