Container image size is critical in cloud-native app development. Bloated images slow pipelines, increase attack surfaces, and inflate costs—a common challenge for tech organizations. This session dives into the art of container image reduction, starting with an overview of overlay filesystems and their role in building container images. We’ll explore how to inspect image layers and analyze Dockerfiles, focusing on best practices and common pitfalls. Attendees will learn to use open-source tools like dive, docker-squash, and stargz-snapshotter and techniques like multi-stage builds and distroless images to reduce image sizes by over 80%, crucial in production