Incremental image

One of the goal of Camel K is to provide a Cloud Native experience for Camel developers. It means basically to have a quick build of the application based on the Camel route you provide and an execution that should be as fast as possible.

In order to reduce the time to build and execute an application we adopt various strategies. If an application has a container with all the dependencies required, then, we just reuse such container, having an immediate start of your application. And then we have the concept of incremental image.

If you’re familiar with Camel K architecture, you know that an Integration uses an IntegrationKit, which is, a reusable resource containing all the dependencies and capabilities required to run a certain "class" of Camel applications. The IntegrationKit is bound to a container image stored in a registry.

When the IntegrationKit is created, it uses as a base image a JDK based container and add certain applications layers on top of it. However, instead of using always the same root base image, we check if an IntegrationKit with a subset of dependencies already exists, sparing quite some time on the generation of the new container image.