Open Source Summit North America 2025

Containers have changed how we build and run services. The days of FTPing a binary up to a server are gone, because our platforms expect to run containers. We build container images at every stage of development, whenever we want to test our services, and when we deploy them.

If container images are what we need, could our development tools help us build them? Yes, they can! In this talk, we'll take a container image apart, see what makes it tick, then put it back together again from first principles - all using Swift!

Swift is a high performance, memory-safe language which is ideal for server-side development. We will:

* download a container image, take it apart by hand and explore what’s inside;
* cross-compile a Swift service effortlessly to different Linux distributions, on x86 or ARM, statically or dynamically linked, from development environments on macOS or Linux;
* use Swift's pluggable build system to produce container images efficiently and automatically for every build;
* test the image.

Containers are a universal building block of modern services. Even if you're not yet using Swift, these ideas and principles also underpin your current build and deployment workflow.