Ever found yourself knee-deep in a routing incident at 3 AM, frantically switching between terminals and browser tabs trying to piece together BGP data? I’ve been there. You’re chasing down a routing anomaly, your coffee’s gone cold, and you’re clicking through endless forms just to figure out which AS is announcing that suspicious prefix.

What if I told you that instead of switching between terminals and browser tabs, you could use natural language to describe the problem, and then ask the computer to do the work for you?

If you’ve been in the container game for a while, you’ve probably seen a lot of buzz around “distroless” containers. The first time I heard the term, I pictured a container floating off into the void - no OS, no shell, just… code. Turns out, that’s not too far from the truth, but just like Serverless, Distroless is a misleading term!

Let’s break down what distroless containers are, why you might want them in your stack, what they’re great at (and not-so-great at), plus how to actually debug one.

Over my two decades as an infrastructure engineer, I’ve watched our field transform dramatically. What began with manual server configuration has evolved into defining entire organizations infrastructure as code. This journey reflects not just technological change, but a complete shift in how we approach managing systems at scale. I’ve been in the trenches through most of it, and I want to share my story of this evolution with fellow infrastructure engineers who’ve lived through similar transitions.