How to Build Lightweight and Secure Container Images using RHEL UBI at Zero Cost

Deploying applications in lightweight container images has practical benefits because container images pack all of the dependencies required for your application to function properly. However, you could lose the benefits of containerization if the container images are too large, and thus take several minutes to boot up the application. In this article, I guide you through how to use Red Hat Universal Base Images (UBI) as the foundation to build lightweight and secure container images for your applications.

Building containerized applications with UBI

Red Hat Universal Base Images provides a lightweight and secure foundation for building cloud-based applications and web applications in containers. With UBI images, reliability, security, performance, and image-lifecycle features are baked in. You can build a containerized application on a UBI image, push it to your choice of registry server, share it easily, and even deploy it on non-Red Hat platforms.

Every UBI image is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the most popular enterprise-grade Linux distribution for the past two decades. Building your container image on a foundation of RHEL software ensures the image is reliable, secure, and freely distributable. You don’t need…