This post follows the journey Istio has taken over the years to optimize our docker image builds. While there is some useful tips to take out of this, this is not intended to be a guide on how a project should build images - the steps taken here go far past the needs of a typical project, optimizing exclusively for speed (and fun) regardless of the complexity to maintain. For background, over the years Istio has consisted of ~10-20 docker images (many are for tests only) made up of ~10-15 Go ...