Building Optimized Containers for Kubernetes

Introduction

Container images are the primary packaging format for defining applications within Kubernetes. Images are used as the basis for pods and other objects, and play an important role in efficiently leveraging Kubernetes’ features. Well-designed images are secure, highly performant, and focused. They are able to react to configuration data or instructions provided by Kubernetes. They implement endpoints that the deployment uses to understand their internal application state.

In this article, we’ll introduce some strategies for creating high quality images and discuss a few general goals to help guide your decisions when containerizing applications. We will focus on building images intended to be run on Kubernetes, but many of these suggestions apply equally to running containers on other orchestration platforms or in other contexts.