debian-slim

If you’re looking for a general-purpose base image with a reasonable size that’s not based on musl, then you might consider using UBI (Universal Base Image) made by Red Hat, which has only 26.7MB in its "micro" version ( registry.access.redhat.com/ubi8-micro), which is also fairly close to Alpine.

Getting Started with Kubernetes sounds like quite a daunting feat. How do you get started with “an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications”?