Gunnar Morling

A deep dive into combining jlink custom runtime images with AppCDS archives to produce smaller and faster-starting Java container images. Using a Quarkus CRUD application as an example, the post walks through using jdeps to identify required JDK modules, building a minimal runtime image with jlink, generating a dynamic AppCDS archive using that same runtime, and packaging everything into a Dockerfile. Benchmarks on a Hetzner Cloud instance show the custom runtime image cuts container size significantly compared to full JDK images, while adding an AppCDS archive on top reduces startup time by ~54%, all while still resulting in a smaller image than the full JDK baseline.

Smaller, Faster-starting Container Images With jlink and AppCDS