#41915 adds the debian-base container image, which is intended to provide a standard base platform for Kubernetes images that require external dependencies. Advantages of debian base include:

• Our team will maintain & update it (until we have automation in place)
• Smaller footprint: it removes a lot of unecessary files like man pages and i18n packages.
• Smaller attack surface: removes unnecessary dependencies like the init system and some system tools. In practice, most of these aren't exposed, but it does reduce the noise in CVE scans.

In theory this should be as simple as changing the base image, and changing apt-get to clean-install (e.g. #42090), but we need to verify that there weren't any implicit dependencies that were removed (e.g. bash).

/cc @aaronlevy @ixdy

xref: #40955