This entire depending on a base container for setup and then essentially throwing away everything you get from the package manager is part of the issue. There is no real package management for Docker. Hell, there isn't even an official way to determine if your image needs an upgrade (I wrote a ruby script that gets the latest tags from a docker repo, extracts the ones with numbers and sorts them in order and compares them to what I have running).
Relying on an Alpine/Debian/Ubuntu base helps to get dependencies installed quickly. Docker could have just created their own base distro and some mechanism to track package updates across images, but they did not.
There are guides for making bare containers, they contain nothing .. no ip, grep, bash .. only the bare minimum libraries and requirements to run your service. They are minimal, but incredibly difficult to debug (sysdig still sucks unless you shell out money for enterprise).
I feel like containers are alright, but Docker is a partial dumpster fire. cgroup isolation is good, the crazy way we deal with packages in container systems is not so good.
Sure if you're just checking for base-distro packages for security vulnerabilities, you're going to find security issues that don't apply (e.g. an exploit in libpng even though your container runs nothing that even links to libpng), but it does excuse the whole issue with the way containers are constructed.
I think this space is really open too, for people to find better systems that are also portable: image formats that are easy to build, easy to maintain dependencies for, and easy to run as FreeBSD jails OR Linux cgroup managed containers (Docker for FreeBSD translated images to jails, but it's been unmaintained for years).
Relying on an Alpine/Debian/Ubuntu base helps to get dependencies installed quickly. Docker could have just created their own base distro and some mechanism to track package updates across images, but they did not.
There are guides for making bare containers, they contain nothing .. no ip, grep, bash .. only the bare minimum libraries and requirements to run your service. They are minimal, but incredibly difficult to debug (sysdig still sucks unless you shell out money for enterprise).
I feel like containers are alright, but Docker is a partial dumpster fire. cgroup isolation is good, the crazy way we deal with packages in container systems is not so good.
Sure if you're just checking for base-distro packages for security vulnerabilities, you're going to find security issues that don't apply (e.g. an exploit in libpng even though your container runs nothing that even links to libpng), but it does excuse the whole issue with the way containers are constructed.
I think this space is really open too, for people to find better systems that are also portable: image formats that are easy to build, easy to maintain dependencies for, and easy to run as FreeBSD jails OR Linux cgroup managed containers (Docker for FreeBSD translated images to jails, but it's been unmaintained for years).