Improving performance for container image build process

It is important for an organization to deliver applications and services at high velocity, evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to serve their customers better and compete more effectively in the market.

Part of this process is automating the container build process and enabling it to do so at a high velocity. To do so, your organization can adopt methods and processes, such as:

• Using prebuilt images.

• Using the smallest parent image possible.

• Identify only what your container requires to accomplish your business goals.

Reference architecture

• You want a quick image build to enable you to iterate quickly in your development process.

• You want to ensure that your container images and supporting packages maintain your expected security posture.

• You want to use prebuilt images that include many of the packages that your container is dependent upon to speed up the build process.

Figure 4. Improving the build pipeline performance of containerized applications

1. A CodePipeline pipeline for your application build is triggered, usually by something like a push to a code repository or writing an object to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. This kicks off a CodeBuild stage.

2. The CodeBuild stage will initiate the building of your containerized application. It pulls the code from the code repository and takes the necessary steps to build your application code.

3. It pulls the parent image from the parent image container repository. It runs through the build steps for your application, as defined in your Dockerfile.

4. It then pushes the built containerized application image in the container registry.

Configuration notes

• Using prebuilt parent images can decrease the time it takes to build the application specific container image. Your image has to install fewer packages as many of them will be included in the parent image.

• Using a base image built in-house, you will have to do less functional testing because the base image has already been tested in previous builds.

• Work with other teams in your organization to determine the baseline security and business requirements that apply to all containerized applications and where there are some overlaps between teams.

• The base image of your container image should have the minimum packages and libraries that are required to build your application container image.

• Identify only what your container requires to accomplish your business goals, store things like picture images and state data outside of your container.

• If your running application is a compiled artifact, place only the artifact and necessary supporting packages in the container, excluding the unnecessary application code.

References

Build a continuous delivery pipeline for your container images with Amazon ECR as a source