What It Takes to Make and Maintain a Buildpack and Stacks - Forest Eckhardt, VMware Tanzu

What It Takes to Make and Maintain a Buildpack and Stacks - Forest Eckhardt, VMware Tanzu

In order to have a successful well crafted buildpacks a lot of design concerns and automations need to be handled. It then requires monitoring and upkeep to ensure that buildpacks users are getting the best outcome when they use them. However, because that burden is dealt with by the buildpack team it offloads that work from the user that just wants to create high quality, optimized, reproducible app images.

In this talk we will discuss what it takes to make and maintain buildpacks and stacks and how buildpacks offload a huge amount of work for the user by doing the following. Setting up stack automation to ensure that all operating system packages are up-to-date or dependency automation to ensure all of the dependencies that are pulled in by the buildpacks are up-to-date. Devising solutions for clever language specific caching of not only downloaded dependencies but also ways of caching intermediate build artifacts or packages pulled in while building applications to make the rebuild process even faster. The inclusion of SBOM scanning and cataloging during the build process allows for a more in-depth accounting of the dependencies that are actually contributing to your image.