App Size: A Battle for Every Kilobyte, or Prioritizing Functionality?

<p>A while back I inherited a service whose Docker image was 1.2GB. Pulls were slow, the CI cache was useless, and the deploy step took long enough that people context-switched

<h2> The Problem with Fat Images </h2> <p>We've all been there: you pull a Docker image, and it's 1.2GB. You run a simple Node app, and the image is bigger than your entire OS.

<p>When I started working with Docker, I made the same <br /> mistake most beginners make — I used the full base image <br /> and copied everything into the container without

<p>A 1.2 GB image for a service that's a few megabytes of compiled code is one of those things everyone accepts until someone actually looks at it. Slow pulls, slow deploys, a

<p>In Q3 2025, our 14-person frontend team stared down a 3.2MB initial bundle for our Angular 18 enterprise resource planning (ERP) app — a figure that triggered 4.7s first

<h2> A 14-Second Build Dropped to 3 Seconds, Then Everything Else Went Wrong </h2> <p>Six months ago, our API was a standard Express + TypeScript setup running on Node.js 22. It