Canonical Delivers Chiselled Containers to Shrink Runtime Environments
Canonical today made Chiselled Ubuntu containers generally available to reduce the amount of infrastructure required to run cloud-native applications in a production environment.
Chiselled Ubuntu containers are small images that comply with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification. Canonical has built more than 20 Chiselled Ubuntu containers for runtime environments such as Java, Python and .NET. Any OCI-compatible image can be deployed on those runtime environments.
Additionally, IT teams can use an open source Chisel tool based on a curated collection of Slice Definition Files to convert images used to create an application into smaller Chiselled Ubuntu containers that encapsulate only the application and its runtime dependencies. Chisel makes use of Ubuntu Debian packages access via a command line interface (CLI) coupled with a fine-grained dependency management mechanism. A package slice details a subset of the package’s contents made up of the maintainer scripts and dependencies. No other operating system-level packages, utilities or libraries are included.
Mark Lewis, vice president for application services for Canonical, said that approach eliminates bloat, improves caching and accelerates container startup times to make the overall runtime environment more efficient and reduces the overall size of the attack surface that needs to be defended.
It also eliminates any friction by building bug-for-bug compatible container images for binaries in a way that is transparent to application developers, he added.
Chiselled Ubuntu containers also provide the added benefit of making it simpler to track the provenance of the containers used in a runtime environment, noted Lewis.
Canonical is also committing to extend the same long-term support guarantees it provides for Ubuntu to the Chiselled Ubuntu images it provides, including five-year free bug fixing and security patching for containers built from the main repository and 10-year security patching for the Ubuntu Pro distribution of Linux.
It’s not clear how many IT teams are ready to convert to a more efficient container runtime environment, but there is a clear need. In more challenging economic times, IT teams are under more pressure to cost-optimize infrastructure usage. Shrinking the overall size of an application footprint enables organizations to reduce their monthly cloud bill or increase the number of applications that can be deployed without increasing those costs.
It also makes it simpler to deploy applications in edge computing environments where the amount of infrastructure resources is typically more constrained than in a cloud computing environment.
At the same time, in the name of securing software supply chains, IT teams are also under pressure to reduce the overall size of the attack surface that needs to be defended.
When it comes to cloud-native applications, the challenge is finding a way to use a more efficient runtime to achieve those goals that application developers won’t resist, noted Lewis.
Ultimately, it’s up to DevOps engineers to manage runtime environments, but any time they can achieve their goals in a way that developers will embrace is going to be a better day than the one before.
