Alpine Linux

term

IT supportcloud

The small, security-oriented distribution built on musl libc and BusyBox rather than glibc and the full GNU utilities - the default base image for a very large share of container workloads because of its size.

Choosing it is a trade, not a free win. Images shrink dramatically and attack surface with them, but musl is not bug-for-bug identical to glibc: software that assumes glibc behaviour - some locale handling, some DNS resolution paths, prebuilt binaries linked against glibc - can misbehave in ways that cost more debugging time than the megabytes saved. The correct question is whether your workload's dependencies are actually tested against musl.

Also known as: musl, busybox, apk, container base image

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