I personally love alpine, I’ve been exploring it outside of docker and has proven to be a great canvas for deploying apps. Hope to see more cloud providers support alpine as an option.
I liken it more to my fond days with FreeBSD and OpenBSD. A narrowly scoped base image and userland, but easy access to a vast array of packages/ports, but each explicitly listed and installed.
It's "batteries included" but "pick your batteries" vs "here's a kitchen sink full of batteries."
(Just be aware of the differences between glibc and musl... DNS resolution in particular will bite you if you don't understand the implementation)
- If your resolvers are VIPs for the same process or machine, you can triple you DNS load and overload some crappy DNS dispatchers
- If you try to use multiple resolvers that resolve the same names with different records, you can kind of make it work with glibc but you will have severe problems with musl. This is a bad idea in the first place though