This article describes a set of best practices for building containers. These practices cover a wide range of goals, from shortening the build time, to creating smaller and more resilient images, with the aim of making containers easier to build (for example, with Cloud Build), and easier to run in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

These best practices are not of equal importance. For example, you might successfully run a production workload without some of them, but others are fundamental. In particular, the importance of the security-related best practices is subjective. Whether you implement them depends on your environment and constraints.