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Chainguard Image Now Available for Kubectl

Adrian Mouat
  •  
February 7, 2023

While we might never be able to agree on how to pronounce it, we’re excited to announce that we’ve added a Kubectl image to the Chainguard Images catalog. Despite being one of the most widely used tools in the cloud native ecosystem, there are very few maintained images available today. So we fixed the bug and made one.

How it works 

Kubectl is the entrypoint to most clusters and is often found running inside CI environments, build systems, and even GitOps engines. This means size, pull time, and security are all very important to keeping your pipelines running efficiently and securely. Like all of our Chainguard Images, kubectl supports multiple architectures. While this is relatively standard today, Chainguard’s build of kubectl is the only supported image with arm64 support that we’ve seen.  

Chainguard’s Kubectl Image comes with a Software Bill of Material (SBOM) and is signed with Sigstore, both of which are available in Kubernetes. Our Image is 75 percent smaller than the most commonly used alternative (50MB vs. 200MB) and as always, we target zero-known, reported CVEs, coming in at 0 vs. 60 (including a critical), as of today’s date.

-- CODE language-bash -- docker images --digests REPOSITORY TAG DIGEST IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE bitnami/kubectl latest sha256:a567b806deb48004866315c9d7ac9b9150fcefef82ea26004fb4c94fe8d0d88b f4cc73913b98 6 hours ago 221MB cgr.dev/chainguard/kubectl latest sha256:eba7c948258f228d89ff963ac61c764b29c503ed8f4edebce503fd810b6782df ee2e3d9caf6a 5 hours ago 56.2MB This gives us (221-56.2)/221 = 0.7457 or roughly a 75% reduction in size.

As always, the binaries in our Images are built from source and come with comprehensive SBOMs from the start. These SBOMs contain the package metadata for everything in the Image and can be used for vulnerability scanning or license compliance. You can download the SBOMs for these containers with cosign:

-- CODE language-bash -- $ cosign download sbom --platform=linux/amd64 cgr.dev/chainguard/kubectl Found SBOM of media type: spdx+json … { "SPDXID": "SPDXRef-Package-kubectl-1.26.0-r0", "name": "kubectl", "versionInfo": "1.26.0-r0", "filesAnalyzed": true, "hasFiles": [ "SPDXRef-File--usr-bin-kubectl" ], "licenseConcluded": "NOASSERTION", "licenseDeclared": "Apache-2.0", "downloadLocation": "NOASSERTION", "copyrightText": "\n", "externalRefs": [ { "referenceCategory": "PACKAGE_MANAGER", "referenceLocator": "pkg:apk/wolfi/kubectl@1.26.0-r0?arch=x86_64", "referenceType": "purl" } ], "packageVerificationCode": { "packageVerificationCodeValue": "736a5511d08dd1437f3e167f69b9b78730e70b03" } }

If you want to see up to a 75 percent reduction in your Kubectl Image sizes with more security built in by default start using Chainguard’s Kubectl Image today using documentation in Chainguard Academy. Chainguard Images are currently available for Bazel, Redis, Python, curl, Git, Go, Jenkins, Postgres, Ruby and more. If you’re interested in support contracts, SLAs for vulnerabilities, FIPS-enabled images, or support for custom images or older versions, please reach out

We are always looking for ways to improve our end user experience. If you have feedback or would like to submit a support issue you can reach out to us directly or file it here.

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