<p>I am facing "theoritical" compatility issues when using distroless-based containers with kubernetess 1.10.</p>

<p>Actually, distroless requires docker 17.5 (<a href="https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless</a>) whereas kubernetes does support version 17.03 only (<a href="https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/CHANGELOG-1.10.md#external-dependencies" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/CHANGELOG-1.10.md#external-dependencies</a>) </p>

<ol>
<li>is it possible to run distroless containers within kubernetes 1.10
clusters w/o any issue? </li>
<li>is it possible to build distroless based
images on a build server running docker 17.05 then deploying it on a
kubernetes 1.10 cluster (docker 17.03)?</li>
</ol>

<p>The requirement for 17.05 is <strong>only</strong> to build a "distroless" image with <code>docker build</code> using <strong>multistage</strong> <code>Dockerfile</code>. When you have an image built, there is nothing stopping it from running on older Docker / containerd versions.</p>

<p>Docker has supported images with no distribution for ages now by using <code>FROM: scratch</code> and leaving it to the image author to populate whatever the software needs, which in some cases like fully static binaries might be only the binary of the software and nothing more :)</p>
