Beats: Feature: Use alpine as base image

[willfarrell]

Would be nice to have a smaller docker image.

You can see a sample of filebeat on alpine here: https://github.com/willfarrell/docker-filebeat/blob/master/5.2.1/Dockerfile

Is is possible to compile beats for muslibc so that a glibc hack is not required? Tackling this would allow for an even smaller image than I currently have.

[jordansissel]

See this writeup about why centos 7 is used: https://www.elastic.co/blog/docker-base-centos7

[tsg]

We do consider compiling the Beats with muslibc so that we can produce truly static binaries, but I am worried about hitting similar issues with what the ES team has hit. Will play with it when I have the time.

[webwurst]

Maybe you could provide it as an alternative image and call this experimental. If people hit problems they should switch to the centos image and see if they persist.

[willfarrell]

As @webwurst suggested an alpine branch and/or series of tags would be nice if possible. Complimenting it with notice linking to the blog post would also be helpful for most cause people are going to ask. The ES team points out a lot of good points, none of which are all that surprising. Perhaps because Beats is primarily a "shipper" it could be an exception to their primary reasons outlined in the blog. @tsg let me know if you need some testing done.

[jstoja]

hey @tsg, now that the version 6 is out, any plan to move forward on this? Proposing an alternative image that is lighter is a great idea that probably can be added in the process of creating them!

[StephenOTT]

+1

[mwebber]

Perhaps because Beats is primarily a "shipper" it could be an exception to their primary reasons outlined in the blog.

I'd be in favour of that. Does, for example, the filebeat container need to be based on centos-7? filebeat is by design a fairly minimal package.

It this could be reconsidered, that would be great.

[detailyang]

alpine +1

[kvch]

I transferred the issue to elastic/beats, as beats-docker is going to be archived.

[ph]

@mikemadden42 Is this is something we are planning to do?

[mikemadden42]

@ph I have not seen a plan to switch from centos to alpine as the base image. However, we're working on releasing additional images bases on Red Hat UBI7.

https://github.com/elastic/beats/issues/14214

[ph]

I would say we can close this since redhat UBI7 offer a similar experience wdyt @mikemadden42 ?

[mikemadden42]

@ph I think we can close it, especially considering this historical article. RH's UBI7 image is really close to a minimal CentOS 7 image.

https://www.elastic.co/blog/docker-base-centos7