“Distroless” images contain only your application and its runtime dependencies. They do not contain package managers, shells or any other programs you would expect to find in a standard Linux distribution. A distroless image is a slimmed down Linux distribution image plus the application runtime, resulting in the minimum set of binary dependencies required for the application to run. You don't have Shell in Distroless distribution. A typical container consists of: Distro base layer - linux distribution files (Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian) Runtime layer (JRE for Java, Python runtime, glibc for C++) Application layer - actual application binaries Why should I use distroless images? w Distroless images are very small . The smallest distroless image, gcr.io/distroless/static-debian11 , is around 2 MiB. That's about 50% of the size of alpine (~5 MiB), and less than 2% of the size of debian (124 MiB). The general syntax involves adding FROM ...