New Directions for Container Debloating
Vaibhav Rastogi, Chaitra Niddodi, Sibin Mohan, Somesh Jha · 2017
Application containers, such as Docker containers, are light-weight virtualization environments that "contain" applications together with their resources and configuration information. While they are becoming increasingly popular as a method for agile software deployment, current techniques for preparing containers add unnecessary bloat into them: they often include unneeded files that increase the container size by several orders of magnitude. This not only leads to storage and network transfer issues but also security concerns. The problem is well-recognized but available solutions are mostly ad-hoc and not largely deployed.