Creating a VPS Minimalist Image

General Discussions
1

Hey folks,
I am designing an ultra-lightweight headless OS tailored for cloud deployment and web hosting. I want to minimize both the disk footprint and idle RAM consumption to leave maximum room for database caches and web servers.

I am weighing a few fundamental design choices and would love your input:

  1. C Library: Should I go with an Alpine-style musl libc to keep the binary sizes tiny, or stick to glibc for maximum compatibility with pre-compiled web app binaries (Node, Python wheels, etc.)?
  2. Init System: Is it worth dropping systemd in favor of sysvinit or OpenRC to save those extra 10–20MB of idle RAM, or does that break too many modern deployment tools used by web developers?
  3. Security/SSH: What is your preferred lightweight alternative to standard OpenSSH for a minimal secure shell setup?

Any other suggestions ?

Apart from that, I want to know whether this has been already made by somebody(Please drop the link below)
And Is this project worth building ?

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2

Interesting project.

My main concern is that you may be optimizing for image size and idle memory at the expense of ecosystem compatibility.

For a general-purpose VPS platform, I would strongly recommend glibc unless you have a very specific workload profile. The few megabytes saved by musl are often outweighed by the operational cost of dealing with third-party binaries, Python wheels, vendor agents, monitoring tools, and application stacks that assume a glibc environment.

The same applies to systemd. On modern cloud instances, the memory difference is usually negligible compared to the RAM consumed by databases, caches, application runtimes, and containers. In return, you gain compatibility with a large amount of existing tooling and documentation.

For SSH, I would honestly keep OpenSSH. It is already mature, well-audited, widely supported, and rarely the component that determines the overall footprint of a server.

As for whether this already exists, Alpine Linux, Void Linux (musl variants), Buildroot, and several container-focused distributions have explored similar design goals. The challenge is usually not building a smaller system, but maintaining long-term compatibility without introducing friction for users.

If your target audience is developers deploying Node.js, Python, PHP, or Java applications, I would prioritize compatibility first and footprint second. A VPS image that “just works” is usually more valuable than one that saves a few megabytes.

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Thanks for your feedback @MarcelStevano :grinning_face:

You got it right ! My target audience are Node.js, python, PHP or java applications. I am thinking to build something like one click installer to make useful(Unzipping, running docker, etc). My goal is to build something useful and open source. Could you suggest me some ideas to build ?

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I would look for a problem that existing projects do not solve well.

Projects like Coolify, Dokploy and CapRover already provide one-click deployments, Docker integration, SSL, databases and app templates, so competing feature-for-feature may be difficult.

One idea could be focusing on ultra-small VPS instances (512 MB to 2 GB RAM).

For example:

  • Automatic memory optimization for Node.js, Java and Python apps
  • Resource limits generated automatically based on VPS size
  • Low-memory deployment profiles
  • Safe swap/zram configuration
  • Automatic OOM prevention and service recovery
  • Performance recommendations based on actual workload

Another idea would be a “developer bootstrap” tool rather than a full operating system.

Something that turns a fresh Debian/Ubuntu installation into a production-ready application server with a single command:

  • Docker
  • Firewall
  • SSH hardening
  • Automatic updates
  • Backups
  • Monitoring
  • Reverse proxy
  • SSL certificates

I think solving operational pain points is more valuable than building another minimal Linux distribution.

The best open-source projects usually start from a very specific problem that developers face every day.

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Nice idea !
It would be great if we can make it together.
Thanks

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6

Not exactly what you ask for but worth a look:

Download Ubuntu for IoT boards | Download | Ubuntu – it allows to build custom images for selected hardware and applications

And, probably, Use Ubuntu in public clouds | Download | Ubuntu may be of interest as well.

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