What is Microcontainers?
A Microcontainer contains only the OS libraries and language dependencies required to run an application and the application itself. Nothing more. Rather than starting with everything but the kitchen sink, start with the bare minimum and add dependencies on an as needed basis.
Microcontainers is a tool in the Container Tools category of a tech stack.
Microcontainers is an open source tool with 1.6K GitHub stars and 139 GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Microcontainers's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Microcontainers?
Developers
4 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Microcontainers.
Microcontainers's Features
- Size — MicroContainers are small. As shown above, without changing any code the image is 22 times smaller than a typical image.
- Fast/Easy Distribution — Because the size is so much smaller, it’s much quicker to download the image from a Docker registry (eg: Docker Hub) and therefore it can be distributed to different machines much quicker.
- Improved Security — Less code/less programs in the container means less attack surface. And, the base OS can be more secure (more below).
Microcontainers Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Microcontainers?
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
GitHub
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.
Visual Studio Code
Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
Docker
The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere
npm
npm is the command-line interface to the npm ecosystem. It is battle-tested, surprisingly flexible, and used by hundreds of thousands of JavaScript developers every day.
