Cleaning up old Docker images on Service Fabric cluster

Question

I have a Service Fabric cluster with 5 Windows VMs on it. I deploy an application that is a collection of about 10 difference containers. Each time I deploy, I increment the tag of the containers with a build number. For example:

foo.azurecr.io/api:50
foo.azurecr.io/web:50

Our build system continuously builds each service, tags it, pushes it to Azure, increments all the images in the ApplicationManifest.xml file, and then deploys the app to Azure. We probably build a new version a few times a day.

This works great, but over the course of a few weeks, the disk space on each VM fills up. This is because each VM still has all those old Docker images taking up disk space. Looking at it right now, there's about 50 gigs of old images sitting around. Eventually, this caused the deployment to fail.

My Question: Is there a standard way to clean up Docker images? Right now, the only idea I have is create some sort of Windows Scheduler task that runs a docker image prune --all every day or something. However, at some point we want to be able to create new VMs on the fly as needed so I'd rather each VM be a "stock" image. The other idea would be to use the same tag each time, such as api:latest and web:latest . However, then I'd have to figure out a way to get each VM to issue a docker pull command to get the latest version of the image.

Has anyone solved this problem before?

Answer 1

You can configure PruneContainerImages to True . This will enable the Service Fabric runtime to remove the unused container images. See this guide