We wrote just two days ago about the massive Docker 1.10 release, and now it has been revealed to us that the Docker officials are considering dumping the Ubuntu Linux operating system in favor of Alpine Linux for the official images.

"Consider" is not the proper word in the sentence above because, by the looks of it, the Docker founder Solomon Hykes has already hired the developer of the Alpine Linux distribution to do all the migration work for them.

"Incidentally, we have hired Natanael Copa, the awesome creator of Alpine Linux and are in the process of switching the Docker official image library from Ubuntu to Alpine," reveals Solomon Hykes, founder and CTO of Docker, in a Hacker News comment.

For those of you who are not in the loop, Alpine Linux is an open source operating system dedicated to offering users a server-oriented, secure computing environment. It is lightweight, small and simple to use, built on top of Busybox and musl.

Moving the official Docker images to Alpine Linux has several benefits, as Brian Christner reports in a recent blog article. First, you will see an increase in speed when downloading, installing and running the images on your Docker host.

Then, the overall security of the Docker images will also be improved, due to the smaller footprint. Faster migration between hosts, which is essential for HA/DR configurations, and smaller disk storage are also two important benefits of the switch.