BCI-Base, BCI-Minimal, BCI-Micro, and BCI-BusyBox

The table below provides a quick overview of the differences between BCI-Base, BCI-Minimal, BCI-Micro, and BCI-BusyBox.

This SLE BCI comes with the Zypper package manager and a free SLE-BCI repository. This allows you to install software available in the repository and customize the image during the build. The downside is the size of the image. It is the largest of the general-purpose SLE BCIs, so it is not always the best choice for a deployment image.

A variant of BCI-Base called BCI-Init comes with systemd preinstalled. The BCI-Init container image can be useful in scenarios requiring systemd for managing services in a single container.

This is a stripped-down version of the BCI-Base image. BCI-Minimal comes without Zypper, but it does have the RPM package manager installed. This significantly reduces the size of the image. However, while RPM can install and remove packages, it lacks support for repositories and automated dependency resolution. The BCI-Minimal image is therefore intended for creating deployment containers, and then installing the desired RPM packages inside the containers. Although you can install the required dependencies, you need to download and resolve them manually. However, this approach is not recommended as it is prone to errors.

This image is similar to BCI-Minimal but without the RPM package manager. The primary use case for the image is deploying static binaries produced externally or during multi-stage builds. As there is no straightforward way to install additional dependencies inside the container image, we recommend deploying a project using the BCI-Micro image only when the final build artifact bundles all dependencies and has no external runtime requirements (like Python or Ruby).

Similar to BCI-Micro, the BCI-BusyBox image comes with the most basic tools only. However, these tools are provided by the BusyBox project. This has the benefit of further size reduction. Furthermore, the image contains no GPLv3 licensed software. When using the image, keep in mind that there are certain differences between the BusyBox tools and the GNU Coreutils. So scripts written for a system that uses GNU Coreutils may require modification to work with BusyBox.

For your reference, the list below provides an approximate size of each SLE BCI. Keep in mind that the provided numbers are rough estimations.