SlimImage: Slashing Container Size by Up to 95% While Hardening Production Cloud Infrastructure

Description and use

SlimImage reduces container size to 38 MB, removes all CVEs, and cuts pull time to 0.3 s, improving resilience and lowering network costs.

Problem

Container images are often bloated with unnecessary tools, libraries, and binaries, causing slow pull times, high storage and egress costs, and large attack surfaces.

Outcome

SlimImage cuts image size by up to 96 %, removes all CVEs, and reduces cold pull time from several seconds to sub‑second, improving autoscaling latency and lowering network costs.

Workflow

• Build the original image with Docker
• Run slimimage build --target <image> --tag <image>:slim --probe-http-get /healthz --probe-exec "python -c 'import app; print(\"Synthesized\")'" --preserve-ca-certs --generate-sbom
• Verify size reduction with docker images --format "table {{.Repository}} {{.Tag}} {{.Size}}"
• Scan both images with Trivy to confirm CVE count
• Integrate the command into CI/CD (e.g., GitHub Actions) to harden every build

Evidence

Standard Node.js Image (~1.1 GB) … SlimImage Optimized Artifact (~38 MB)

Source

Node.js (v20 Bullseye) 1,080 MB → 42 MB, 96.1% reduction, 0 CVEs, ~0.35s pull vs 8.9s

Source

trivy image my-service:latest | grep -E "Total: [0-9]+" # Total: 78 ... trivy image my-service:slim | grep -E "Total: [0-9]+" # Total: 0

Source