[blabitty]

>You can copy the golang binary into an alpine container and instead of having to maintain a server

Why would you do this when a go binary doesn't need anything but the kernel? Why start with a full OS, even Alpine?

[andrewzah]

Alpine is a common example, but you could use scratch and only copy in exactly what you need. Both of these are extremely lightweight.

Having a full OS is helpful for troubleshooting issues, for starters. If one of the nodes is having an issue, it's helpful to be able to log in and examine the state of things.

One pain point of docker/k8s is figuring out networking, and having a container with dns-utils installed is quite handy.