​​An article about why you should think twice before using Alpine Linux for your container images.

In nutshell, Alpine uses musl - an implementation of C standard library and many things depend on C standard library including DNS. Since musl doesn’t support DNS over TCP by design, you may get nxdomain errors if the DNS response is more than 512 bytes. And it can happen in Kubernetes.

TBH, Alpine got more stable in the recent years, but still…

The article also provides some alternatives like Wolfi, UBI, and of course, Debian/Ubuntu images. You can use Distroless images as well if you are looking for a small and secure images.

Also, here’s a related Reddit thread, so you can follow the discussion there as well.

#docker #alpine #dns #Kubernetes