Alpine is pretty nice though using it in containers you are not getting the best part of it: the hardened kernel. I'd say Alpine is a better fit for the host OS where you have a few moving parts.

It will be great for compiled language base images, but even there it might be tricky if you rely on 3rd party packages. Libc compatibility issues are also real. It's great that they are slowing addressing them though.

Wouldn't CoreOS be the better host though, if just hosting containers is the only goal? Or are there things Alpine would do better?

I didn't mean to say Alpine is the best host OS option. It's just it's a better idea compared to Ubuntu :-)

Beg to differ. You should read the docs for CoreOS. One OS is made to host containers, the other is more general.

I see same things but under different branding. It's all.

Anonymous coward: explain your downvote, please.

I've ran into this as well. Having a hard time remembering what the issue was. Maybe DNS-related?

These incompatibilities arose from software that was written to rely on glibc-specific name resolution quirks. Neither musl nor docker rely on these misplaced expectations, but unfortunately some projects have decided to blame a standards-compliant libc implementation rather than fix their own software.

I am not familiar enough with the quirks of glibc name resolution to say much more than a lot of my stuff relies on binaries compiled against it. Who, in your opinion is to blame here, and what can we do to fix it?

If Alpine does not support the software I depend on I have no use for it. I would like to use the official Docker containers as far as I can but I'm most certainly not going to spend time recompiling third party deps to accomplish that. Shipped products trumps "security" and by god "size" every time, always.

It sure would be nice if everything was working according to the standards :-)

Looks like the DNS issue might finally be getting resolved:

https://github.com/gliderlabs/docker-alpine/issues/8