Using Alpine Linux for Docker images is doable, of course, but, as the post admits, Ubuntu is the "cloud OS of choice". Now it has the critical mass in terms of samples, deployment automation scripts, and packages. The package ecosystem is the key here though. Can you really get the same packages in Alpine? Yes, in some cases, but you can't say with a straight face that Alpine == Ubuntu :-)

So if you can't go the Alpine (or if you don't want to :-)) there's a tool you can try. It's called DockerSlim. It was created for the Docker Global Hack day that ended a few days ago. You can see a demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKdHnfEbc-E The demo shows how I minified a 430MB Ubuntu 14 based Docker image (result: 40MB image that can be 9MB smaller once the tool is refactored and enhanced).

It's not production quality yet (it's a mess though it works for simple images), but it's a good start. Contributions are highly encouraged :-)

I guess this is the URL - https://github.com/cloudimmunity/docker-slim

Wow, this looks brilliant! I'm going through the sources. Thanks!

Yes, that's the repo. It's about 5% complete and the code is very ugly right now, but it's functional enough as a PoC :-)

Let me know if you want to contribute (even if it's not code). The most useful improvement on the todo list is to handle links properly. If you look at the image artifacts the tool generates in the demo you'll see two node.js runtimes...

This might be an interesting project to turn into a SaaS business where the setup difficulty (Ubuntu vs. Alpine) is not as relevant as when just an end user. Price it under the utility model or a simple $50/yr, and add mobile apps/ browser extensions to allow for some tweaking.

Also, for those others that don't care for medium:

https://github.com/rdsubhas/docker-tor-privoxy-alpine