rules_docker

Bazel is worth looking into as soon as you have dependency graphs that your language's native build system can't deal with efficiently, or you have multiple languages that have dependencies on each other's artifacts. A pure Go codebase? Not worth it. Personally, I use Bazel even for small projects as soon as they involve things like generated code or gRPC. Yes, there are multiple rulesets for deployments, like rules_k8s[1] and rules_docker[2]. Of course, you can easily build your own custom deployment pipeline. [1]: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_k8s [2]: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_docker

Bazel can natively build images without Docker. Bazel has many other benefits too like creating a full dependency build graph and fully reproductible builds. https://bazel.build/ https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_docker

A larger problem is that Docker is nearly inherently unreproducible. Downloading and installing system packages lists, etc. For this reason, Google doesn't use Docker at all. It writes the OCI images more or less directly. https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_docker

Bazel should be pretty good for that: https://bazel.build/ https://docs.bazel.build/versions/master/be/protocol-buffer.... We use it at work to build a web app whose backend is written in Go and frontend in Typescript. All of the code gets built and placed in a Docker image using these rules: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_docker