Changes to Chainguard Images Developer Tier

At Chainguard, our mission is: the safe source for open source. Today, we focus on that mission by building hardened, low-to-zero CVE container images for our customers. From Java to Go, from Redis to PostgreSQL, we endeavor to protect it all.

Just a short while ago, the container images that we protected numbered in the mere dozens. Fast forward to today and we now have hundreds of images in our Directory. Before you know it, there will be thousands of open source container images protected and maintained by Chainguard.

Our customers rely on us to protect these images because they put them into production in some of the world's most demanding, regulated environments. The infrastructure powered by Chainguard Production Images is used in retail banking applications, in federal and state agencies, by leading security companies, and underpinning category-defining SaaS products.

Chainguard does more than power infrastructure with our Production Images. We also make our technology accessible to those who want to test it, develop with it, and innovate outside of a production environment. We have free versions of our Images — called Chainguard Developer Images — and we offer these to allow anyone to easily evaluate the power of Chainguard Images.

As our Production Images inventory continues to grow at an increasing pace, we believe it makes sense to streamline the Developer Images offering to those images that provide the clearest and quickest insights into how Chainguard can help engineers build faster and more securely. 

As part of this, we will be focusing our investments in our Developer Images to a comprehensive, but representative list of images. That means that some previously available Developer Images will no longer be freely available. We are doing this to make room for the investments in the Chainguard Production Images offering that represent the majority of what our customers want from us.

While the Developer Image list going forward still covers many cases, we want to be transparent in communicating this change well in advance of making it. Accordingly, you can find details about which images will remain in the Developer Images offering after November 21, 2024 in this article. Anyone who was testing a previously available free Developer Image can continue to do so until that date, and any image that you have already downloaded will continue to function, but will begin accumulating unpatched CVEs.

Open source software is, of course, free and open for anyone to use. That’s no small part of what makes it great. Chainguard wants to protect all open source software with our Images product so the tradeoffs of managing and securing open source software are a thing of the past. Our free Developer Images offering, streamlined going forward with these upcoming changes, will continue to enable anyone to access, test, and evaluate the best of what Chainguard has to offer, both quickly and easily.

If you are currently an open source project using the Chainguard Developer Images and are impacted by this change, we would love to discuss how we can support you and your project’s needs. Please contact us and we will be in touch.