Update readme and contribution guide.

Author: krk

CONTRIBUTING.md

@@ -1,18 +1,15 @@
 # Contributing Guidelines
 
-Thank you for your interest in contributing to our project. Whether it's a bug report, new feature, correction, or additional
-documentation, we greatly value feedback and contributions from our community.
+Thank you for your interest in contributing to our project. Whether it's a bug report, new feature, correction, or additional documentation, we greatly value feedback and contributions from our community.
 
-Please read through this document before submitting any issues or pull requests to ensure we have all the necessary
-information to effectively respond to your bug report or contribution.
+Please read through this document before submitting any issues or pull requests to ensure we have all the necessary information to effectively respond to your bug report or contribution.
 
 
 ## Reporting Bugs/Feature Requests
 
 We welcome you to use the GitHub issue tracker to report bugs or suggest features.
 
-When filing an issue, please check existing open, or recently closed, issues to make sure somebody else hasn't already
-reported the issue. Please try to include as much information as you can. Details like these are incredibly useful:
+When filing an issue, please check existing open, or recently closed, issues to make sure somebody else hasn't already reported the issue. Please try to include as much information as you can. Details like these are incredibly useful:
 
 * A reproducible test case or series of steps
 * The version of our code being used
@@ -21,23 +18,11 @@ reported the issue. Please try to include as much information as you can. Detail
 
 
 ## Contributing via Pull Requests
-Contributions via pull requests are much appreciated. Before sending us a pull request, please ensure that:
+This repository contains the `.tar.xz` layers, and the Dockerfiles, used to create the base images. 
 
-1. You are working against the latest source on the *main* branch.
-2. You check existing open, and recently merged, pull requests to make sure someone else hasn't addressed the problem already.
-3. You open an issue to discuss any significant work - we would hate for your time to be wasted.
+The Dockerfiles in this repository allow you to recreate or modify the base images using your own build process. We will accept pull requests on documentation, examples, bug fixes and the Dockerfiles. We will also accept issues and feedback to add or remove software from the images. 
 
-To send us a pull request, please:
-
-1. Fork the repository.
-2. Modify the source; please focus on the specific change you are contributing. If you also reformat all the code, it will be hard for us to focus on your change.
-3. Ensure local tests pass.
-4. Commit to your fork using clear commit messages.
-5. Send us a pull request, answering any default questions in the pull request interface.
-6. Pay attention to any automated CI failures reported in the pull request, and stay involved in the conversation.
-
-GitHub provides additional document on [forking a repository](https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo/) and
-[creating a pull request](https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-pull-request/).
+However, our goal is to provide images that are optimized for performance on the Lambda service.
 
 
 ## Finding contributions to work on
@@ -56,4 +41,4 @@ If you discover a potential security issue in this project we ask that you notif
 
 ## Licensing
 
-See the [LICENSE](LICENSE) file for our project's licensing. We will ask you to confirm the licensing of your contribution.
+See the [LICENSE](LICENSE) file for our project's licensing. We will ask you to confirm the licensing of your contribution. We may ask you to sign a [Contributor License Agreement (CLA)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement) for larger changes.

README.md

@@ -1,17 +1,30 @@
-## My Project
+## AWS Lambda Base Container Images
 
-TODO: Fill this README out!
+AWS provided base images for Lambda contain all the required components to run your functions packaged as container images on AWS Lambda.
+These base images contain the Amazon Linux Base operating system, the runtime for a given language, dependencies and the Lambda Runtime Interface Client (RIC), which implements the Lambda [Runtime API](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/runtimes-api.html).
+The Lambda Runtime Interface Client allows your runtime to receive requests from and send requests to the Lambda service.
 
-Be sure to:
+To learn more about how these images are used, check out the AWS documentation on how to [Create an image from an AWS base image for Lambda](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/images-create.html#images-create-1).
 
-* Change the title in this README
-* Edit your repository description on GitHub
+### Maintenance policy
 
-## Security
+AWS will regularly provide security patches and other updates for these base images.
+These images are similar to the AWS Lambda execution environment on the cloud to allow customers to easily packaging functions to the container image.
+However, we may choose to optimize the container images by changing the components or dependencies included.
+When deployed to AWS Lambda these images will be run as-is.
 
-See [CONTRIBUTING](CONTRIBUTING.md#security-issue-notifications) for more information.
+This is more of an *artifact store* than a Git repository, for reasons explained later. Please note that **branches other than `main` are regularly force-pushed, and content may disappear without warning**.
 
-## License
+## What we're doing here
 
-This project is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License.
+As soon as new AWS Lambda base images are available, an automated process snapshots the layers and configuration used to create these images and force-pushes them to this repository.
+
+For examples, please see other branches in this repository.
+
+Committed alongside the Dockerfiles in the branches are the tarballs, which balloon the repository size. Thus, we force-push branches that contain the tarballs.
 
+Although we force-push the files away, the older versions of our images remain present on DockerHub and Amazon ECR.
+
+## Licence
+
+This project is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License.