Skip to main content
Docker has become the standard unit of deployment for modern applications, but containerisation done poorly creates security vulnerabilities, bloated images, and operational complexity. Hellenic Technologies establishes container best practices for every client project: minimal base images, multi-stage builds, non-root users, and image scanning in CI — these are not optional extras, they are baseline requirements for production containers. Dockerfile design starts with choosing the right base image. We prefer distroless or alpine-based images that contain only what the application needs, reducing attack surface and image size simultaneously. Multi-stage builds compile or bundle application code in a build stage and copy only the final artefact into a lean runtime image. The result is typically 5–20x smaller images compared to naive Dockerfiles, which means faster pulls, lower registry storage costs, and fewer CVEs. Docker Compose is the standard for local development and simple single-host deployments. We maintain compose files for all services, including development overrides that mount source code for hot reload without modifying the production image. For production container orchestration beyond a single host, we transition to Kubernetes or Docker Swarm depending on team complexity tolerance and scale requirements. Container management services:
  • Dockerfile audit and optimisation: multi-stage builds, minimal base images
  • Container image scanning with Trivy or Snyk in CI pipelines
  • Docker registry setup: GitHub Container Registry, ECR, Docker Hub, or self-hosted
  • Docker Compose configuration for development and single-host production
  • Container resource limit configuration (CPU, memory) for production stability
  • Non-root user enforcement and read-only filesystem configuration
  • Container log routing to centralised logging infrastructure
  • Registry cleanup policies for old image versions
  • Docker networking: custom bridge networks, internal service discovery
  • Container security benchmarking against CIS Docker Benchmark