Custom Assembly Updates: Create Multiple, Customized Variants of a Chainguard Container

We’re excited to announce new enhancements to Chainguard Custom Assembly that make it easier than ever to create and manage customized Chainguard container images.

With this update, customers can now add, delete, rename, and edit customizable variants of any Chainguard container image directly in the console. That means you can tailor images to the needs of each service, application, or environment team — all in a frictionless, self-serve experience.

Introducing self-serve provisioning

Back in July, we announced the general availability of Custom Assembly, a new feature for Chainguard Containers, which allows users to customize a standard Chainguard container image with additional packages. Chainguard builds and maintains these customized images in our hardened infrastructure, with full coverage of our CVE remediation SLA across the customized image.

At that time, we shared our roadmap for Custom Assembly. First on the list was ”self-serve provisioning,” a capability that allowed users to provision multiple, customizable variants of an image in an entirely frictionless manner. This has been one of the most highly requested features from customers.

With our new enhancements, you can now:

• Create new customized variants of any Chainguard image to serve different services or environments.

• Add, delete, rename, and edit images as your needs evolve.

• Preview and manage build history, including logs and build status, without leaving the console.

These robust customization capabilities give customers more flexible, powerful, and programmatic access to the Chainguard Factory. Customers like Tecsys are already taking advantage:

"Custom Assembly gives us the ability to easily provision multiple, customizable variants of Chainguard's container images across a diverse array of applications and teams. Each container image includes only the components required by our application, which ultimately saves our developers time building custom images and maintaining those custom images over time."

Learn more about Custom Assembly by checking out our docs.

Customer benefits

Custom Assembly was built to make image customization simple, secure, and scalable for customers. We handle the upfront build and ongoing maintenance so your teams can stay focused on building and shipping software.

Here are the benefits customers should expect:

• Minimalism and customization: Quickly stand up a new custom variant that includes only the minimal components required for a specific service, instead of relying on a single “catch-all” image for every application.

• End-to-end security: Every customized image is built in Chainguard’s SLSA Level 3 environment and continuously maintained under our CVE remediation SLA.

• Reduced operational overhead: Eliminate the need to maintain Dockerfiles, manage custom pipelines, or manually track vulnerabilities across variants.

• Lower costs: Save on infrastructure (COGS), engineering hours (OPEX), and ongoing maintenance complexity.

• Faster time to production: Move from source to deployment faster with Chainguard automating secure image builds on your behalf.

Customers like Unanet have already started reaping these benefits:

"Our engineers love how frictionless it is to customize a standard Chainguard Container to the specifications of their applications. Chainguard maintains every variant under its SLA, saving our engineers from the toil of image customization and vulnerability management."

Start building with Custom Assembly today

We’re excited to hear your feedback on Custom Assembly as you start using these features. Your experience and feedback play a critical role in shaping our roadmap so we can deliver even more value to users.

If you’d like to learn more about how Chainguard’s minimal, customizable, and zero-CVE containers can transform your software supply chain, reach out today.