Containers

What is the digest of an image? What problem does it solves?

Difficulty: unrated

Source: bregman-arie/devops-exercises by Arie Bregman

Answer

Tags are mutable. This is mean that we can have two different images with the same name and the same tag. It can be very confusing to see two images with the same name and the same tag in your environment. How would you know if they are truly the same or are they different?

This is where "digests` come handy. A digest is a content-addressable identifier. It isn't mutable as tags. Its value is predictable and this is how you can tell if two images are the same content wise and not merely by looking at the name and the tag of the images.