Lean Docker images for multi-service local dev with memory considerations

[Ryan_C]

I'm containerizing our team's diverse set of development environments using Docker to finally achieve consistency, but I'm running into issues with image bloat and slow build times, especially for our Python and Node.js services with many dependencies. I understand the basic layer caching principles, but my multi-stage builds still feel inefficient, and the resulting images are much larger than I think they need to be. For developers who have optimized their Docker workflows, what specific strategies and base images did you settle on for keeping images lean and builds fast? I'm also grappling with how to structure our docker-compose setup to effectively manage a local development stack that includes databases, message queues, and multiple microservices without consuming all my system memory, and whether I should be using bind mounts for live code reloading or relying on image rebuilds.