Technology · Ebook

ko: Effortless Go Containers

by Shriira Press

ko is a container image builder made for one job and made to do it well: turning a Go program into a container image without a Dockerfile and without a Docker daemon. It runs go build on your machine, lays the binary onto a small base image, and pushes the result straight to a registry — producing reproducible, SBOM-friendly, multi-platform images in seconds. This book follows ko from first principles to daily practice: the problem it escapes, how it assembles an image layer by layer, how it talks to registries and local clusters, how ko:// references make container builds an invisible step of Kubernetes deployment, and the supply-chain features — SBOMs, multi-platform builds, reproducibility, and signing — that come almost for free.

Contents

1. 1Preface
2. 2Chapter 1 — The Problem ko Solves
3. 3Chapter 2 — How ko Builds an Image
4. 4Chapter 3 — Registries, References, and Local Workflows
5. 5Chapter 4 — ko and Kubernetes
6. 6Chapter 5 — Supply Chain: SBOMs, Multi-Platform, and Signing
7. 7Chapter 6 — ko in Practice