When an application is deployed onto Pivotal cloud foundry, the buildpack dependencies along with runtime (jre in my case) is copied onto each application container for each instance of he application. Now, this makes the app independently deployable etc. However, if there are a group of apps with same buildpack and runtime , is there an way to keep the buildpack and runtime in a separate place and all apps somehow borrowing it for that place? For example, it says in the pivotal doc that 1.3.x onwards , some of the default buildpacks devised a way to reduce the deployable size but it doesnt specify the mechanism behind the same.
This may be a very novice question, but I just wanted to explore this and couldn't find much inputs. Thanks for your time.
No, the buildpack artifacts will always be installed into the running container.
Is there a particular problem you are trying to solve? You would be very unlikely to improve performance by having containers access these artifacts remotely, and you shouldn't be quite so starved for disk space in a cloud deployment.