> If you have one image based on Ubuntu in your stack, you may as well base them all on Ubuntu, because you only need to download (and store!) the common base image once
This is only true if your infrastructure is static. If your infrastructure is highly elastic, image size has an impact on your time to scale up. A great example is using spot instances; in my line of work we need to create thousands of spot instances to run many millions of time-sensitive batch jobs at certain times and dates, then scale those instances down rapidly to reduce the bill.
This is only true if your infrastructure is static. If your infrastructure is highly elastic, image size has an impact on your time to scale up. A great example is using spot instances; in my line of work we need to create thousands of spot instances to run many millions of time-sensitive batch jobs at certain times and dates, then scale those instances down rapidly to reduce the bill.
Of course, there are better choices than Alpine to optimize image size. Distroless (https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless) is a good example.