Container offering for supporting Native AOT scenarios

[mthalman]

We need to determine if and how we should adjust the set of container images we provide to meet the needs of Native AOT scenarios. It looks like the set of package dependencies that are needed for those scenarios is different from standard deployments.

For example, there is work to remove a dependency on libstdc++: dotnet/runtime#76655. That likely has no impact on the current full versions of Debian, Ubuntu, and Mariner since that package is installed by default. But it would impact Alpine, distroless Mariner, and chiseled Ubuntu since it's explicitly being added in those images.

We should avoid the inclusion of any unnecessary packages in our images. It leads to a larger image size and increased exposure to vulnerabilities.

[mthalman]

If there were to be separate images only intended for Native AOT deployments, this would be limited to just runtime-deps images because it is, by definition, a trimmed application that has the runtime embedded in it.

[eerhardt]

Also consider containers that support building NativeAOT apps.

Right now:

FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/sdk:7.0 AS build
RUN apt update
RUN apt install -y clang zlib1g-dev

Is needed in order to publish with PublishAot=true.

[mthalman]

[Triage]
First step is to investigate the scenario with an app building exercise. This will help to determine what the requirements are for the different Linux distros that are relevant. At the very least, we could then provide sample documentation to illustrate how to configure Dockerfiles for this scenario. We can then make a determination of whether it's worthwhile to actually provide official base images.

[mthalman]

One interesting aspect of native AOT publishing is the following from https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/deploying/native-aot/:

A native AOT binary produced on Linux machine is only going to work on same or newer Linux version. For example, native AOT binary produced on Ubuntu 20.04 is going to run on Ubuntu 20.04 and later, but it is not going to run on Ubuntu 18.04.

This could have implications on which OS versions we make the SDK available on. For 7.0, for example, we only provide Ubuntu 22.04 images.

[xlievo]

sdk:
FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/sdk:7.0.103-alpine3.17-amd64 AS build
RUN apk update && apk upgrade
RUN apk add --no-cache clang build-base zlib-dev libssl1.1

runtime:
FROM alpine:3.17
RUN apk update && apk upgrade
RUN apk add --no-cache libstdc++

PublishAot=true