3 years ago

Software rot, or bit rot, is a term to describe entropy causing a code base to degrade over time. The decay is usually in small ways that are non critical on their own but can add up to real problems over time if not dealt with. A similar problem can occur with Docker images that are not regularly maintained.

This tends to imply a few things: This can lead to a situation where software projects that have a high amount of churn will have their images built frequently and often deployed without any extra considerations.

The long and short is that even though no changes at all have happened to a project, there can be an unknown and potentially large amount of surprise work that arises with a ‘stable’ code base.