An Insight Into the Impact of Dockerfile Evolutionary Trajectories on Quality and Latency

Containerization is a software development approach aimed at packaging an application together with all its dependencies and execution environment in a light-weight, self-contained unit, of which Docker has become the de-facto industry standard. By defining the specific Docker image architecture and building orders, dockerfile plays an important role in the Docker-based containerization process. Understanding the evolution of dockerfile and which dockerfile architecture attributes enhance dockerfile quality and reduce image build latency can benefit the efficient processing of containerization. In this paper, we perform an empirical study on a large dataset of 2,840 projects to shed light on the impact of dockerfile evolutionary trajectories on quality and latency in the Docker-based containerization. Based on the six categories of dockerfile evolutionary trajectories we discovered, we build two regression models to explore the impact of dockerfile evolutionary trajectories and specific architecture attributes on dockerfile quality and image build latency, which derives a number of suggestions for practitioners.