Canonical Releases Chiseled Ubuntu Containers for .NET

Canonical and Microsoft today announced the general availability of chiseled Ubuntu containers for .NET 6, 7, and 8. Created as part of the partnership between the two companies, chiseled containers are ultra-lightweight implementations designed specifically for cloud apps.

“There has always been a need for smaller and tighter images,” Microsoft’s Richard Lander said. “Developers remind us, as a base image provider, of that on a regular basis. Chiseled images leapfrog over approaches we’ve looked at in the past. We love the idea and implementation of chiseled images and Canonical as a partner. When technical leaders at Canonical shared the first demos of chiseled images with us, we immediately wanted to be a launch partner, and we’re thrilled that we’re shipping Ubuntu chiseled images for .NET as part of this release.”

As Canonical explains, Chiseled Ubuntu containers are ultra-small Open Container Initiative (OCI) images that deliver only the application and its runtime dependencies, and no other operating system-level packages, utilities, or libraries. That means they are lightweight in every way, easy to maintain and operate, secure, and efficient in resource utilization.

And they’re particularly lightweight on .NET: Where a standard Ubuntu image is about 219 MB and a chiseled Ubuntu image for Java/JRE 8 is about 113 MB, a size reduction of 51 percent, a chiseled Ubuntu image for trimmed .NET is 12 MB and a chiseled Ubuntu image with Ahead of Time (AOT) for .NET is just 8 MB. Users can opt-in to security hardening to further reduce their attack surface and optimize container build, testing and deployment.

Chiseled Ubuntu containers come with a support and security maintenance from Canonical. You can learn more in this .NET video on YouTube.