One of the beauties of cloud platforms is that (ideally) you don’t need to care that much about the infrastructure that runs your application. As a developer, you focus on creating your application logic, and then rely on the platform, OpenShift, to keep it available at all times, providing scalability and failover. Your application may run on any worker node in the cluster. These worker nodes must download the container images before running the application. The time it takes to download these images is reduced by reducing the image sizes, although it’s not the only factor. Intelligent use of the filesystem layering inside the container image is also key. Nevertheless, a simple rule still holds: Take only what you need. Removing inessential components not only speeds things up by making images smaller, it also helps reduce the vulnerability surface of the image. A bug can’t be exploited if it is not installed.