I don&#x27;t think you&#x27;re the only one. I ran saltstack with my containers for awhile, but it just created too many dependencies (as you notice yourself) and made the build process difficult.<p>I find that if I keep things in bash the images become more &quot;dumb&quot; and therefore more portable.<p>In lieu of a caching API you might find a package cache (apt-cacher-ng, squid, etc) will help speed up installs a lot. I found one image that was pulling down almost 5 GB with every build!