It never fails that the CNCF seems be cooking up something interesting in their ecosystem. In my free time, I find myself in a habit of playing in the Sandbox to see what new cutting edge tools I can add to my collection. It is my goal today to introduce you to a project at the Sandbox stage known as "Buildpacks".
What Are Buildpacks?
Buildpacks are an OCI-compliant tool for building applications that serve as a higher-level abstraction as opposed to writing Dockerfiles. The project was spawned by Pivotal and Heroku in 2011 and joined the Cloud Native Sandbox in October 2018. Since then, Buildpacks has been adopted by Cloud Foundry and other PaaS, such as Gitlab, Knative, Deis, Dokku, and Drie.
The project seeks to unify the buildpack ecosystems with a platform-to-buildpack contract that is well-defined and incorporates years of learning from maintaining production-grade buildpacks at both Pivotal and Heroku.