Programming Tutorials

  You have just finished building a Docker image on your local machine. It runs perfectly in your local environment. You push it to your registry, deploy it to a Kubernetes cluster or a standard EC2 Linux instance, and the pod immediately enters a   CrashLoopBackOff . Checking the logs reveals the fatal error: standard_init_linux.go:228: exec user process caused: exec format error If you are working on an Apple Silicon machine (M1, M2, or M3) and deploying to a standard cloud environment (AWS, GCP, Azure), this is not a script error. It is a CPU architecture mismatch. The Root Cause: Binary Incompatibility This error message comes directly from the Linux kernel, not Docker itself. When a container starts, Docker invokes the entrypoint command. The kernel attempts to load the binary executable defined in that entrypoint. The kernel reads the file's  ELF (Executable and Linkable Format)  header to determine which instruction set architecture (ISA) the binary was compil...

  If you develop on an M1/M2/M3 Mac (ARM64) and deploy to AWS, Azure, or GCP (typically AMD64/x86_64), you have likely encountered two distinct classes of failures. Runtime Failure:  The container builds fine locally, but crashes instantly in production with  standard_init_linux.go:228: exec user process caused: exec format error . Build Time Failure:  While building the Docker image locally for the production architecture,  pip install  fails with cryptic GCC errors, or the build hangs indefinitely while installing packages like  numpy ,  grpcio , or  cryptography . This post addresses the architectural mismatch causing these issues and provides a production-grade implementation using Docker Buildx and multi-stage builds to solve them. The Root Cause: CPU Instruction Sets & Python Wheels The  exec format error  occurs because binary executables contain instructions specific to a CPU architecture. Your Mac speaks ARM64; your pro...