GoogleCloudPlatform
NPM & Yarn :: alpine versions
Can you please provide some context around why you would like to see GCB support alpine-based versions of these builders? What do the alpine versions provide that the existing versions don't?
Hey @bendory,
Alpine version is around 117 MB while Debian version is 943 MB. There is no additional benefits except the image size, but it directly affects the build times.
$ docker images REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE node 14.10.0 a23e6f36bbcf 5 days ago 943MB node 14.10.0-alpine 783243cf9e78 6 days ago 117MB
Simple hello world app without any additional module takes around 90-120 secs on Debian version (these images are not cached on GCB, on each build, they have to be pulled first) Same app with alpine version is around 30-60 secs.
If you use an old version of nodejs (8.x), which is already cached on GCB, build times decrease from 60+ secs to 10-15 secs.
Docker HUB version of images are suggested on image notices but performance of hub is not stable most of the time, and in general, it adds around 45-120 secs to build times depend on time and probably the load of Docker's hub service.
As you explained on other thread, these new versions are not available on GCB cache directly, there is some additional work on your side, but I believe that most beneficial version is to keep them on GCB cache and purge them periodically to keep them up to date (and save space for non-active versions). It can be done even for Docker Hub pulls.
Pulling on each build is just wasting bandwidth, CPU and developer time without any additional benefit. (I don't know internals of GC, if I am missing something, please let me know)
Thank you!
