oh god I fell in love with everthing related to Alpine Linux. Found out about it when I started playing around with docker but then ported all my home servers and Raspberry Pis to Alpine. It's so damn small and has little overhead. Need docker? `apk add docker`, done!
I've written guides on how to boot Alpine (even with GUI) over PXE [1] and how to set up a perfect file server that runs from a RAMdisk USB Thumb drive with full disk encryption [2]
You seem to have jumped the gun a bit. The question was "why are people obsessed with container size?" while you're answering some question like "What's a good and small container OS?"
Yes kind of but also not really -- this answer was really delightful to read because Alpine linux literally was the first answer to the first concerns with container size. Before docker multi stage builds existed (people we doing the builder pattern adhoc before that anyway), the usual way to get drastic size reductions in container size was to run your container on alpine linux.
Base Ubuntu/Fedora used to be absolutely huge, and no one was smart/patient enough to pick out all the dynamic libs that you needed with your JAR or script to go into production so you usually just shipped the whole fat image.
Yes yes, but you also seem to be missing the point. Here you are answering the question "How did Alpine appear and what came before it?" but again missing the original question which was "why are people obsessed with container size?"
https://blog.haschek.at/2020/the-perfect-file-server.html is made obsolete by SmartOS, which does the exact same thing, in addition to offering Triton (enterprise web GUI for virtual systems), OpenZFS (end-to-end data protection, ease of administration), zones (full-blown, running-at-the-speed-of-metal virtual UNIX servers), DTrace (for production-safe, real-time, deep machine state instrumentation and inspection), Bardiche (for building firewalls), FireEngine / Crossbow (high-performance TCP/IP stack for building virtual switches and routers) and imgadm(1M) / vmadm(1M) (for virtual server provisioning and software management), and last but not least, a reference implementation of the NFS V4 protocol.
or by proxmox or by any other OS. That's not what it's about. If it comes with a web gui, it's already bloated for me. This project was about the minimal perfect setup for my needs and I only need SSH access
SmartOS does not come with a web GUI; Triton is completely optional and isn't required at all, but if one is running 100,000 servers or more, it's there as a gratis option if one needs one.
As far as I am aware, and please correct me if I am wrong, but "proxmox" does not have nearly the same list of capabilities as SmartOS, all the while running from a ~650 MB, read-only RAMDisk.
It's too bad that in the path to minimal disk size they decided to simply disregard legal obligations and they ended up producing something that violates the open source licenses of the contents... so unusable for any product.
Alpine is one of the unsung heroes of the container world. It's insane how much value Natanael Copa has created & shepherded over the years (decades?). Recently came upon an interview with him and it was the first time I saw the creator behind Alpine Linux[0]. Similarly, the musl libc project, just chugging along, giving most projects that build on top of it an easy out for portable static binaries.
Thank you for those links, I am about to gobble up those blog posts -- I recently went on a benchmarking kick[1] and diskless alpine instantly struck me as the perfect server setup. ECC memory + running from ram would give me full use (to put in RAID/whatever else) of the NVMe drives, it's something I'm going to try out as soon as I get a chance to.
I am so interested in the infrastructure space, I know exactly two hosting providers that will give me PXE level access (so I could use something like tinkerbell[2]):
- OVH [3][4]
- Vultr[5]
- LeaseWeb[6]
Unfortunately my personal favorite hosting provider, Hetzner[7] (I fell in love the moment I came across the robot marketplace) does not offer it yet, though I've automated going through their rescue system at this point so it's OK.
I've written guides on how to boot Alpine (even with GUI) over PXE [1] and how to set up a perfect file server that runs from a RAMdisk USB Thumb drive with full disk encryption [2]
[1] https://blog.haschek.at/2019/build-your-own-datacenter-with-... [2] https://blog.haschek.at/2020/the-perfect-file-server.html