Everyone knows the smallest container is the best, right?

At Oracle, we know the importance of having the most efficient platform for your business applications. And we believe that Oracle Linux is the best platform for mission critical delivery of those applications.

One way to ensure efficiency and security is to make your container as lean as possible. While the Oracle Linux images aren't huge, we figured we could make them even smaller by removing as many non-essential components as possible.

Introducing the new Oracle Linux slim images for Docker

We've just introduced a new base Oracle Linux 7-slim Docker image that's a minuscule 114MB. Ok, so it's not quite as small as Alpine, but it's now the smallest base image of any of the major distributions. Check out the numbers in the graph to see just how small.

This image is truly tiny: it doesn't even include a text editor! We've stripped everything back to provide the smallest possible image (and thus, the smallest possible attack surface) for your containers. But, it still comes with yum enabled and working, so it's simple to get the packages you need for the services you want to run.

Let's take the slim image for a spin

Building your own container from the new slim image is as simple as specifying FROM: oraclelinux:7-slim in your Dockerfile . All the official Oracle Linux images are published on the Docker Hub and are free to download, distribute and use by anyone. And all our images can pull updates from the Oracle Yum Server, so when you build your containers, you can apply the latest security fixes and updates. What's more, Oracle updates these images every time a CVE is released, so we do most of the heavy lifting for you.

Let's take a look at a sample Dockerfile that extends the slim image and installs a Software Collection to provide the latest PHP 7.0 release for your application:

Building this image actually creates a container that's almost 130MB smaller than the official PHP 7.0 CLI image from the Docker Hub:

Relative Image Sizes:

1 php-ol7-slim 7.0 ed603c8d47a0 235.4 MB 2 php 7.0 6c38128f3482 363 MB

So where to from here?

If you haven't already checked out the official Oracle Dockerfiles on GitHub, you should. The product teams in Oracle have provided tons of sample Dockerfiles for some of the biggest Oracle products available, including Database, WebLogic and Java. And if you don't feel like rolling your own image, you can simply pull an image from the Oracle Container Registry to get started in minutes.

You may also want to enable the Software Collections for Oracle Linux repo to grab all the latest languages and server software supported on Oracle Linux. Everything that we ship in the Software Collections is covered by your existing Oracle Linux Premier support subscription.

If you want to chat with other Oracle developers about using Docker, we have an entire community dedicated to Docker and containers on the Oracle Technology Network.