Hands-On Microservices with Kubernetes

Using minimal base images

The principle of minimizing the attack surface exhorts you to use as many minimal base images as possible; the smaller and more restricted, the better. In addition to these security benefits, you also enjoy faster pulling and pushing (although layers should make it relevant only when upgrading your base image). Alpine is a very popular base image. Delinkcious services take this approach to the extreme and use the SCRATCH image as a base image.

Pretty much the entire service is just the Go executable, and that's it. It's small, fast, and secure, but you pay for it when you need to troubleshoot issues and there are no tools to help you.

If we follow all of these guidelines, our images will be secure, but we should ...