Houston Java User Group meeting: Docker Who Small Containers Through Time and Space Presentation

Have you recently moved to microservices? Your team is deploying the code much faster, but data transfer costs are going up as well, aren’t they? That’s because the size of containers matters the most, and keeping them lightweight means saving on bandwidth usage.

BellSoft’s engineers have come up with a solution, which is full-fledged Alpine Linux support in OpenJDK. By that, we’ve also invented a real-life TARDIS: Containers that take only a few MB of storage but carry enormous potential. With the release of JDK 16, the Portola Project has been integrated into the OpenJDK mainline as part of our JEP 386. Duct-taping with a glibc layer will become a thing of the past, as all the processes will connect flawlessly. Your company will get to use tiny container images independently of the distribution kit vendor. They have been available for a long time, but the official HotSpot port status for the musl library will expand the scope and simplify related development.

My talk is going to touch upon the benefits that Alpine Linux is bringing to the OpenJDK community. It will also explain how to optimize Docker images for free by changing just one or two lines of code. Lastly, I’ll offer a tool for choosing an optimal container that will suit your project perfectly.

About the speaker:

Dmitry Chuyko is a performance engineer at BellSoft, an OpenJDK committer, and a public speaker. Prior to joining BellSoft, Dmitry worked on the Hotpot JVM at Oracle, and before that he had many years of programming experience in Java. He is currently focused on optimizing HotSpot for x86 and ARM, previously being involved in rolling out JEP 386, which enables the creation of the smallest JDK containers. Dmitry continues his journey in the containerization process and is happy to share his insights and expertise in this field. Dmitry is a well-known speaker in the Java community, and one of his recent public presentations is available here.

Dmitry is also a contributor to the DZone, and his most popular recent publications include: