[zbentley]

The loose integration between the declarative tools and the container build system drags down performance and creates a lot of footguns re: image size and inert declarative-build-system transitive deps left lying around, I’ve found.

[mort96]

Why would terraform leave transitive steps around? To my knowledge, Docker doesn't record a log the IO syscalls performed by a RUN directive, the layer just reflects the actual changes it makes. It uses overlayfs, doesn't it? If you create a temporary file and then delete it within the same layer, there's no trace that the temporary file ever existed in overlayfs, correct?

I'd get your worry if we were talking about splitting up a terraform config and running it across multiple RUN directives, but we're not, are we?

[zbentley]

Transitive deps, not steps.

Random examples off the top of my head: Puppet has a ton of transitive Ruby libraries and config files/caches that it leaves around; Terraform leaves some very big provider caches on the system; plan or output files, if generated and not cleaned up, can contain secrets; even the “control group” of the status quo with RUN instructions often results in package manager indexes and caches being left in images.

Those are all technically user error (hence why I called them footguns rather than defects), but they add up and are easy mistakes to make.