Putting a fat jar into a Docker container is a waste of storage, bandwidth and time. Fortunately, we can leverage Docker’s image layering and registry caching to create incremental builds and very small artifacts. For instance, we could reduce the effective size of new artifacts from 75 MB to only one MB! And the best is that there is a plugin for Maven and Gradle handling everything for us.

Dealing with version numbers is an important challenge on the way to Continuous Delivery. The classical versioning approach (“8.2.0”) and release workflow is inappropriate, because it can’t be automated properly. This post shows how we can leverage the Git commit hash to get rid of manual workflows and automate the Continuous Delivery pipeline. At the end, every build will produce an artifact which is potentially shippable. We’ll implement this solution with Maven and Docker.