Clarification how images are being released.

[dannemano]

Open Liberty´s documentation is solid, but it is somewhat lacking in the Docker image area.

For instance, when a new version is released (and a blog post published) and available to download from https://openliberty.io/downloads/#docker it can take weeks for the corresponding Docker image to become available.

If a new release is available for download, I assume automatic builds would produce a new image in a day at least. Note that I don't expect / require a speedy release, that is what you pay support for, but at least some general information so I don't have to check every day for a new image to have been built.

There is also a guide in https://openliberty.io/guides/containerize.html but it fails to clarify the strategy for how Docker images are produced. For instance:

• What Java versions (8, 11, 14) are supported?
• When will new Java versions be introduced as JVM in the OL image?
• When will old Java versions be removed from Docker images?
• Guidance and explanation of differences between "full", "kernel", "kernel-slim". There are some documentation in this repository, but it might be good for new users to have that re-written for easier consumption in the Docker Open Liberty guide above.

There are also two repos on Docker hub:

• https://hub.docker.com/_/open-liberty
• https://hub.docker.com/r/openliberty/open-liberty

which one of the above should be used? What is the difference between them?

[leochr]

@dannemano Thank you for opening this issue and for your feedback.

We are looking to improve the release process to reduce the time between the availability of Open Liberty (OL) runtime and images. Agree, that it hasn't been consistent. Some internal build/infrastructure issues are affecting the release this time and further delaying the availability of the new version. Apologies for the delay. We are looking into resolving the issue. Opened this issue to track one of the improvement: https://github.com/OpenLiberty/ci.docker/issues/214

Agree that documentation can be improved. We'll add information about Java versions in this repo. Also, we'll work with the Open Liberty Guides team to add a summary about Java versions and tags (and point to this repo as appropriate).

We have images based on both Ubuntu and UBI. Since UBI itself is not officially available in Docker Hub, OL images based on UBI are available in a separate repo. Images available from both repos are supported. Our recommendation is to use UBI based images. Some information is documented here.

[dannemano]

Thanks for the explanation around OL and building the Docker images. I am really happy with Open Liberty and how the Docker images are constructed, it works great!