container builds for services, compiled/packaged components you want to spin up somewhere, often the Dockerfile is very simple, use some base image, add config and your binary or packaged artifact (jars, minified JS etc) and done.
Often the complexity is (or should be) in the shared base not the individual images you build per commit or PR merge.. for those simple images using something like Jib (bazel can do it too..) where it just constructs the image in user land by adding files to the tarball. I imagine this works for arm binaries from x64 too as long as you can cross compile.. how do you feel about these libraries that make simple images waaay more accessible? No docker required.
I would love to see more development in this space. I'm aware of tools like bazel, nix, and jib (I feel like I've seen an equivalent to jib for Go) that can build Docker images "outside" Docker/BuildKit. I believe the .NET SDK can do something similar for .NET applications. And then there's tools like buildpacks, nixpacks, devbox, etc that still use Docker to produce the image, but don't require thinking in Dockerfiles.
I have some ideas I want to explore with Depot, but it really it feels like it should be possible to make cross-compiling and dependency encapsulation easy to use, so "building a container image" is reduced to creating a tarball in the correct OCI format, and you don't have to interact with Dockerfiles as much if you'd prefer not.
I’ve used jib and bazel and that’s exactly what they do, both are language agnostic and push files around. Jib has a java bent but not a required part of it.
I can totally see people using Depot bc it’s way easier and more obvious, works in the obvious way, and that is how things work today. It doesn’t challenge you to think, why the hell do I need a super privileged process with magic Dockerfile incantations just to take a tar of files and add another file to it? With some metadata? Docker has created some weird defaults.
Often the complexity is (or should be) in the shared base not the individual images you build per commit or PR merge.. for those simple images using something like Jib (bazel can do it too..) where it just constructs the image in user land by adding files to the tarball. I imagine this works for arm binaries from x64 too as long as you can cross compile.. how do you feel about these libraries that make simple images waaay more accessible? No docker required.