How to put Swift in a box: Building container images with swift-container-plugin

Did you know that you can write a cloud-native service in Swift and publish it in a container image, ready to run on any standard container-based cloud infrastructure, all using just the Swift compiler and its build system?

In this talk we'll see how Swift's strong multi-platform support and highly extensible package manager can take care of the whole process for you, allowing you to build your application, package it and upload it in one efficient step:

• Swift SDKs extend your native Swift compiler, giving it the ability to cross-compile and produce Linux executables directly on macOS.
• swift-container-plugin extends Swift Package Manager, giving it the ability to construct a container image and publish it to a container registry.

We'll see these tools in action and peek behind the scenes to learn how they actually work. Along the way we'll answer questions such as:

• How can we build Linux binaries on macOS?
• Can we build our own custom Swift SDKs?
• What actually goes on when we build, push and pull container images?
• How can we build a container image from scratch, just using Swift?