Honey I shrunk the container! Containers are increasingly the standard mechanism for packaging, delivering and deploying software.

They provide a simpler, more lightweight architecturally significant form of virtualisation than VMs. They are a natural candidate for running microservices. But can we do better?

If we can simplify our containers, we can shrink them further, improving: - performance - security - management

In this talk I'll be discussing: - advantages of microcontainers over containers - how to build and use microcontainers - Smith (https://github.com/oracle/smith) - a microcontainer builder from Oracle - Crashcart - (https://github.com/oracle/crashcart) a tool for debugging microcontainers (and containers)