When packaging up various npm components, BusyBox was recommended to me as a great solution for creating containers with a low overhead -- I eventually stumbled across Alpine (which is built on top of BusyBox) and have been really happy.

Alpine has a tiny footprint, which is great for wrapping Node.js which itself is tiny; But wait, there's more, Alpine has a great package-manager similar to apt, called apk -- this is what sold me on it over BusyBox.