Don't use Alpine as A12 base image

General
1

Hi,
this post is intended as a discussion starter.

I have seen DNS problems with the Alpine base image multiple times. The problem is described here: Solving DNS issues in musl

Now I heard in the last A12 release presentation that Alpine will serve as the base image for A12 releases. As there are other alternatives to Alpine (e.g. Alpaquita, Ubuntu, …), I would like to understand the reasoning behind this decision.

Thanks,
Guido

2

Hey,
For the first step, we thought that we could benefit from the Alpine distribution because of its very small size. The DS team has tested the image on the TPI cluster and there has been no problem so far but the DNS problem has come to our attention many times. We’re aware of this problem and after discussion, we think that it’s better to avoid it even if we can’t reproduce it on the TPI cluster.
There is already a decision made to switch to Ubuntu distribution instead, because of these reasons:

  • A void unpredictable DNS issue of Alpine
  • Make the image compatible with arm & amd architecture
  • Make the image compatible with Java dependencies that use Java Native API with glibc.
3

@kien-crisp-oak that’s good to hear - thanks for the update!