10 years ago this meme said “compiling” shows how much docker has made things more “efficient”
Someone doesn’t know how to leverage Docker BuildKit
Is there more to it than using multistage builds when appropriate?
Oh yeah there is a lot you can implement to really get the most out of your architecture via docker and minimize your build times.
One is using BuildKit with BuildX and Docker Build Cache.
BuildX is the one I highly recommend getting familiar with as it’s essentially an extension of BuildKit.
I’m a solutions architect so I was literally building with these tools 15 minutes ago lol. Send any other questions my way if you have any!
Ah thanks, I do have another question actually! So aside from speeding up builds by parallelizing different stages, so that
FROM alpine AS two RUN sleep 5 && touch /a FROM alpine AS one RUN sleep 5 && touch /b FROM alpine AS three COPY --from=two /a /a COPY --from=one /b /b
takes 5 iso 10 seconds, are there any other ways buildkit speeds up builds?
Yeah! So the first thing that BuildKit provides that greatly improves build time is that it will detect and run the two stages (one, two) in parallel so the wall-clock time for your example is 5s (excluding any overhead). Without BuildKit, these would be built serially resulting in a wall-clock time of 10s (excluding any overhead).
Additionally, BuildKit uses a content-based cache rather than a step-by-step key cache used by classical Docker. This content-based cache is intelligently reused across different builds and even re-ordered instructions. If you were to build then rebuild your example, the sleep steps would be skipped entirely as those steps are fully completed and unchanged in the content-based cache from the previous build. It will detect changes and re-build accordingly.
Lastly, (albiet not a BuildKit feature directly) is to leverage inline build caching for things such as dependencies so they are persisted to your filesystem and mounted during build time such that you don’t have to fetch them constantly. This isn’t really necessary if leveraging BuildKit fully since the content-based cache will also handle the dependencies and only pull if changed. i.e:
RUN --mount=type=cache,target=/root/.cache \ your-build-command
Not really, no.
Yes. Sorry. I expected everyone to know this, but in hindsight this is of course a bad assumption.
I was going to watch a tuto on how to be more efficient but YouTube is still buffering
Delayed because of your ad-blocker :p
I swear it’s gonna load any second now and I’ll be able to do something productive!
Still better than ads, though 😄
DevOps, not programmer.
Why not? Why doesn’t the programmer want to test a container?
True. Nothing beats running your unit tests in the actual container image that will be run in production.
Race condition that only happens on the much faster production hardware: Allow me to introduce myself
Unit tests can’t win ’em all. That’s where things like integration tests, staging environments, and load testing come in.
The final layer of protection is the deployment strategy, be it rolling, canary, or blue-geen.
Or an issue that only appears when using ARM and not on my AMD64 dev machine
Yeah, and it’s useful to just check everything so you don’t forget to add some essential system package for e.g. SSL, especially when working with Alpine.
Unit tests? No matter where you run them, and normally this is done by CI in a prebuilt container image, so you don’t have to wait for “docker building”. Acceptance tests must be run in an environment as close to production as possible, but that’s definitely not a programmer’s job.
Guess I must turn in my programmer-badge.
what if I’m doing my programming inside a devcontainer?
How often do you rebuild the image?