Next Step: Alpine is multi-arch

As of today, the multi-arch manifest of alpine points to several architectures, including s390x. This means, you can now re-use all the Dockerfiles saying "FROM alpine" without changes (no "s390x/"). Or, of course, things like "docker run -ti alpine sh" work without an s390x/.

An Overview on s390x Base Images

For s390x, quite a few options for base images are available on Docker Hub/Docker Store these days. They vary from enterprise environments over community distributions to minimal images. This post gives an overview on what is provided by various sources.

Docker CE for all distributions

The previous post mentioned that Docker provides CE packages for Ubuntu. For users of Debian, SLES, RHEL, Fedora, ClefOS, openSUSE, and Alpine, there is still an option to get the latest Docker CE version to their environment:

Another Base Image Option: Alpine for s390x

Alpine Linux has announced their new 3.6 release which includes s390x support. Alpine is a minimal Linux distro. Contrary to other distributions, it uses musl as runtime library (not glibc), helping in downsizing images.

A Docker image named s390x/alpine is available at Docker Hub and while being a fully functional base, it is just 5 MB (!) in size: