Assemble 2025: Opening Keynote

With Dan Lorenc, CEO & Co-Founder of Chainguard

In the opening keynote of Chainguard Assemble 2025, we announced Chainguard Libraries, Chainguard VMs, and a new partnership with Datadog. Chainguard CEO and Co-Founder Dan Lorenc is joined by fellow Chainguard co-founders Matt Moore and Kim Lewandowski to tell the story of Chainguard, and why now is the time to provide a better, more secure future for software development.

ATO or Bust: Mastering the Technical Requirements for FedRAMP

With Ken McDonald (Distinguished Software Architect, Checkmarx), Orion Foeller (Lead, Public Sector Infrastructure & Security Engineering, Scale AI), Maya Kaczorowski (CEO, Oblique) and Aaditya Jain (Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Chainguard)

Do you have a looming FedRAMP deadline? This session is for you. The challenge lies in balancing the continuous delivery of new features, managing incidents and bugs, and navigating increasingly complex deployment models—often with limited bandwidth to address the growing list of security and compliance requirements.

Hear from companies of all sizes about unexpected twists and turns in satisfying stringent FIPS and continuous monitoring requirements. We’ll break down the key container security requirements for FedRAMP and how Chainguard is the fastest, trusted way to get your ATO.

DoD Data Program Case Study: Enhancing Security and Efficiency with Chainguard

With Dylan Shepard Lead Engineer at Booz Allen Hamilton

Join us to hear a detailed case study on how the Department of Defense (DoD) utilized Chainguard's secure container images to enhance the security and efficiency of a major data program. Learn about the initial challenges faced that drove the selection of Chainguard. Find out why it was important to modernize the platform to achieve growth and scale, manage vulnerabilities, and ensure compliance with stringent security standards.

This session will detail the steps to implement Chainguard's solutions, including integrating and using secure container images to protect sensitive data. Key takeaways include best practices other organizations can apply to enhance their security and operational efficiency using Chainguard's solutions.

Confluent's Journey to Distroless: Pitfalls and Lessons Learned

With Luke Young, Principal Security Engineer at Confluent

Confluent Cloud is a data streaming platform built on thousands of Kubernetes clusters across AWS, Azure & GCP covering over 90 regions. Within those Kubernetes clusters we run hundreds of unique services/images. This talk shares our journey of migrating those services to distroless images, highlighting the obstacles and lessons learned along the way. We will discuss practical on the ground advice for companies starting their own distroless migration and how to make it a success for your security team and your developers.

Inside Chainguard's Factory

With Dustin Kirkland, VP of Engineering at Chainguard

Chainguard is different. We built a new distro, designed from the ground up for continuous nano-updates rather than big releases. We built a factory that is among the fastest in the world at building from source and patching deeply into dependencies. Learn how it works and why we think nothing less will solve software supply chain security. Join this session to understand how Chainguard builds guarded images and libraries that dramatically accelerate and streamline standardization of open source usage within an organization.

The Old, the New, and the Strange: Securing Deep Learning

With Patrick Smyth, Staff Developer Relations Engineer at Chainguard

Data poisoning. Input manipulation. Model inversion. As companies race to incorporate deep learning into production applications, we've been introduced to exciting new threats. But how much is totally new under the sun, and how much have we seen before?

In this interactive and meme-filled session, we'll figure out what's old, new, or just plain strange in the rapidly-changing world of deep learning. We'll also demo Chainguard's approach to deep learning infrastructure and model security. Get excited — deep learning might be deeply strange, but there's plenty we can do to make deploying it more secure.

Chainguard Product Deep Dive

With Julian Dunn (Senior Director of Product Management and Design, Chainguard), Mark Baker (Principal Product Manager, Chainguard), Tony Camp (Staff Product Manager, Chainguard), and Sourabh Katti (Senior Product Manager, Chainguard)

Dive into the latest innovations straight from our keynote! Join us for an exclusive session where we’ll break down our newest product announcements, go into deeper demos, and give you direct access to the Chainguard product team for an open Q&A. Bring your questions and get the inside scoop on what’s next!

Seamless Migration to Chainguard: A Maturity-Based Approach to Secure Container Adoption

With Jaime Mickelson (Director of Professional Services, Chainguard) and Gem Wang (Principal Customer Success Manager, Chainguard)

Migrating to a new distribution might seem daunting, but with Chainguard, it doesn’t have to be. In this session, Chainguard experts will walk you through our structured migration approach tailored to your organization’s level of container maturity. Whether you’re just starting with secure container adoption or operating at an advanced level of automation, we’ve developed proven migration patterns that make the transition smooth and predictable. You’ll learn how our container images, built on widely used open-source components, integrate seamlessly into existing workflows, reducing friction and accelerating adoption. Join us to explore real-world migration scenarios, best practices, and how Chainguard makes moving to a secure container platform easier than you think.

Tools and Tactics for Building a Fortified Dev Stack

With Shaun McDonnell, Director Platform Engineering at Shift5

In this lightning talk, you'll explore the challenges of securing software supply chains including STIGs, FedRAMP, and ATOs.

Scalable Enterprise AI: Building Cloud-and-Edge Agnostic Solutions

With Kit Merker, CEO of Plainsight Technologies

Computer Vision is set for massive growth–it’s the most mature AI technology and is expected to generate $50B of value by the end of the decade. To work effectively, Computer Vision needs deployment close to GPUs running at the edge with secure, scalable container-based infrastructure. Securing containerized apps at the edge ensures confidence in the software supply chain and seamless customer deployment. Plainsight makes containerized Computer Vision applications called Filters that safeguard their software supply chain with continuous security via Chainguard so our customers can deploy them with confidence.

Key takeaways:

• The critical role of secure shipping for customer confidence and trust.

• Diverse use cases across multiple industries showcasing Computer Vision's potential and why security is critical to them.

• How secure deployment enables seamless and efficient data processing.