It's great for sending your 6 GB hello world exe to your friends I suppose
You can have a full and extensive api backend in golang, having a total image size of 5-6MB.
What is killing me at the moment is deploying Docker based AI applications.
The CUDA base images come in at several GB to start with, then typically a whole host of python dependencies will be added with things like pytorch adding almost a GB of binaries.
Typically the application code is tiny as it's usually just python, but then you have the ML model itself. These can be many GB too, so you need to decide whether to add it to the image or mount it as a volume, regardless it needs to make it's way onto the deployment target.
I'm currently delivering double digit GB docker images to different parts of my organisation which raises eyebrows. I'm not sure a way around it though, it's less a docker problem and more an AI / CUDA issue.
Docker fits current workflows but I can't help feeling having custom VM images for this type of thing would be more efficient.
So CUDA gets packaged up in the container twice unless I start building everything from source or messing about with RPATHs!
Heck, you can even cross compile go code for any architecture to another one (even for different OSes), and docker would be useless there unless docker has mechanisms to bind qemu-$ARCH with containers and binfmt.
Are you running on bare servers? Sure, a Go binary and a script is fine.
I understand what the OP is saying but not sure they get this context.
If I were working in that world still I might have that single binary, and a script, but I'm old school and would probably make an RPM package and add a systemd unit file and some log rotate configs too!
So people are building docker "binaries", that depend on docker installed on the host, to run a container inside a container on the host– or even better, on a non-linux host, all of that then runs in a VM on the host... just... to run a golang application that is... already compiled to a binary?
Of course you can do it directly on the machine but maybe you don't need containers then.
In the same vein: people put stuff within a box, which is then put within another bigger box, inside a metal container, on top on another floating container. Why? Well, for some that's convenient.