I agree with many of the concerns the author raises, but I'm left with the question:
Given all this, what does layering give us?
It gives some deduplication, but only a crude form. It gives some reproducibility from building off a well-known base and tag, but not full reproducibility. It gives some security benefit from building off a well-known base, but not as large a benefit as standard package managers provide.
I would be excited to see a image distribution system based off of something like casync, maybe with an initial rootfs formed through image-focused distributions like yocto[1]. The embedded device ecosystem has been concerned with reproducibility, image signing, and incremental updates for awhile and I think their approaches are very applicable to container images.
Given all this, what does layering give us?
It gives some deduplication, but only a crude form. It gives some reproducibility from building off a well-known base and tag, but not full reproducibility. It gives some security benefit from building off a well-known base, but not as large a benefit as standard package managers provide.
I would be excited to see a image distribution system based off of something like casync, maybe with an initial rootfs formed through image-focused distributions like yocto[1]. The embedded device ecosystem has been concerned with reproducibility, image signing, and incremental updates for awhile and I think their approaches are very applicable to container images.
[1]: https://www.yoctoproject.org/