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.