[clarkdave]

We used to use alpine because it was smaller (ferrying images in and out of AWS adds up) and the package management UX often felt better (the community and testing repos tend to make many things easily available, which led to simpler and easier to follow Dockerfiles).

Eventually we switched to Debian-based images because of intermittent DNS-related woes that plagued our alpine containers. We struggled to isolate the cause but it seemed to be a combination of Node + Consul DNS. Suddenly those saved gigabytes and smaller Dockerfiles didn’t seem worth the hassle; after jumping to Debian we never saw that issue, nor anything similar.