Your Docker containers are slow, bloated, and vulnerable. And youâre probably making the same mistakes 90% of engineers make in production.
Take my advice and please
⢠Donât use âlatestâ tags, instead use specific versions like node:18.17-alpine
⢠Donât build single-stage fat images; instead, use multi-stage builds to get 50MB images instead of 800MB
⢠Donât run containers as root, instead, create a non-root user for security
⢠Donât copy everything with COPY . ., instead use .dockerignore and specific COPY commands
⢠Donât let containers use unlimited resources, instead set proper memory and CPU limits
⢠Donât deploy without health checks, instead add HEALTHCHECK commands so Kubernetes knows your app works
⢠Donât create 20 separate RUN layers, instead combine commands with && to minimize layers
⢠Donât skip security scanning, instead use docker scan or Trivy in your CI/CD pipeline
⢠Donât use full OS images for simple apps, instead use scratch or distroless base images
⢠Donât write logs to files inside containers; instead, log to stdout/stderr and let orchestrators handle collection
These practices make the difference between hobby projects and production systems.
Your containers should be fast, secure, and predictable. Not slow, vulnerable time bombs.