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Yeah, I think I have an understanding now. We use tagged Docker base images with the app dependencies baked in so you can just use a FROM your Dockerfile and know you have the dependencies in the image and you just add and run your app code.

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Yeah, we do the same thing. This seems to work pretty well, except right now we build these images out of band of our normal build process (if you change these base images, you're expected to kick off another CI job that builds/pushes new versions and updates the versions in the FROM statements in our production Dockerfiles (and our docker-compose.ymls). I'm not sure why we're doing this, since the build cache is actually pretty good at avoiding unnecessary base image builds.

That's how we do it also. You need to integrate a new process that is triggered on base image rebuild that redeploys your container with the new base image (which has security fixes, etc). This pipeline needs to start in Dev and be applied in all your environments, so that you know you are promoting a good base image once you get to production.

We use Kubernetes to trigger rolling restarts with new images when we release a change to the base image, and so far it's been painless, but a lot of work went into it. We use Gitlab, but any CI/CD should allow you to do it.

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