MINIMIZING IMAGES OF DOCKER CONTAINER ROOT FILE SYSTEMS
I. Nikolaeva, Ivan Gankevich · 9th International Conference "Distributed Computing and Grid Technologies in Science and Education" · 2021
Containers is a tool which is often used in development and testing applications because they are easyto-use and lightweight. The container is built based on an image, which is a template for the containerand a way to transmit it over the network. Images can be up to several gigabytes in size. Thus, if youneed to transfer the large application container over the network, or the available memory is scarce(for example, when developing IoT systems), it is necessary to minimize the size of the image.Container images are built on top of the Linux kernel. For interactive work with containers, theyinclude instructions and files that the application never works with inside the container. Theapplications that will be launched in the container and their number are known in advance, so you canuse Linux debugging tools to find out which files are used by applications in the container, and whichcan be excluded from it. This is how the Chainsaw application works. This paper presents the resultsof a study of several different Docker container images. For some application we obtained threefolddecrease of the image size; also, we found that the size of the reduced image is significantly affectedby the base image and the programming language in which the application that runs inside thecontainer is written.