[Tildey]

If I had to guess, Alpine is a very popular choice for building container images in Docker/Kubernetes/whatever the new hotness is since I last worked with containers. Mostly because the aforementioned small size and low overhead add up if you’re at any sort of scale (even one instance on top of your desktop OS).

If you’re wanting to containerise the program, maybe it’s less resource intensive to add those things to Alpine than to run another distro with more support? Obviously only speculation

[iudqnolq]

Doesn't Kubernetes deduplicate layers by hash? I thought the key to minimizing overhead was standardizing on a limited set of images across everything you'll be running on the same host.

Just from reading HN it seems like Alpine had a brief fad a few years ago but never got much traction.

[arccy]

the underlying container runtime (usually containerd) will dedupe shared layers, but there's a lot of things you don't get to directly control, like third party apps, and the bottleneck when spinning up new nodes is real. Plus, envs where there isn't that much caching, like CI.