AL2023 Minimal container image - Amazon Linux 2023
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AL2023 Minimal container image

Note

The standard AL2023 container images are suitable for most use cases, and adapting to the minimal container image is likely to be more work than adapting to the AL2023 base container image.

The AL2023 minimal container image, introduced in AL2023.2, differs from the base container image because it contains only the bare minimum packages needed to install other packages. The minimal container image is designed to be a minimal set of packages, not a convenient set of packages .

The AL2023 minimal container image is built from software components already available in AL2023. The key difference in the minimal container image is using microdnf to provide the dnf package manager rather than the fully featured Python based dnf. This enables the minimal container image to be smaller with the trade-off of not having the full feature set of the dnf package manager which is included in the AL2023 AMIs and base container image.

The AL2023 minimal container image forms the base of the provided.al2023 Amazon Lambda runtime environment.

For a detailed list of packages included in the minimal container image, see Comparing packages installed on Amazon Linux 2023 Container Images.

Minimal Container image size

Because the AL2023 minimal container image contains fewer packages than the AL2023 base container image, it is also significantly smaller. The following table compares the container image options of current and past releases of Amazon Linux.

Note

Image Size is as-shown on Amazon Linux on Amazon ECR Public Gallery.

Image Version Image Size Note
Amazon Linux 1 (AL1) 2018.03.0.20230918.0 62.3MB x86-64 only
Amazon Linux 2 2.0.20230926.0 64.2MB aarch64 is 1.6MB larger than x86-64
Amazon Linux 2023 base container image 2023.2.20231002.0 52.4MB
Amazon Linux 2023 minimal container image 2023.2.20231002.0-minimal 35.2MB

Using the AL2023 Minimal Container image

The AL2023 minimal container image is available on ECR and the 2023-minimal tag will always point to the latest AL2023 based minimal container image, while the minimal tag may be updated to a newer version of Amazon Linux than AL2023.

You can pull these tags using docker with the following example:

$ docker pull public.ecr.aws/amazonlinux/amazonlinux:minimal
$ docker pull public.ecr.aws/amazonlinux/amazonlinux:2023-minimal

The following example shows a Dockerfile that takes the minimal container image and installs GCC on top of it :

FROM public.ecr.aws/amazonlinux/amazonlinux:2023-minimal RUN dnf install -y gcc && dnf clean all