Trusted Container Images: A Better Way to Build and Deploy Software

Traditional delivery mechanisms for open source software like legacy Linux distributions or publicly hosted container images haven’t kept pace with the rate of change in cloud-native development. These incumbent approaches require enterprise engineering and security teams to independently manage their open source artifacts and environments – resulting in costly engineering toil, expensive security breaches, and complex investments to maintain and achieve compliance.

Trusted Container Images like Chainguard Containers represent a novel solution to the challenges associated with the status quo. Chainguard’s 1,400+ minimal, hardened, and zero-CVE images are continuously built from source, complement your existing golden image programs, free up developers to ship products and platforms faster, and secure your open source footprint against supply chain risks.

As this new category of software grows in adoption, Chainguard has developed its first ever Buyer’s Guide to help engineering and security teams identify the right Secure Container Images solution that best fits their needs. That said, container images are just one part of the stack. In the Buyer’s Guide, we also assess the full landscape of Trusted Open Source Artifacts to help enterprises identify a unified, platform approach to simplify open source management and deliver enterprise engineering and security teams secure-by-design open source software.

Why Secure and Simple Open Source Software Matters

A few key drivers often inspire enterprises to seek trusted open source artifacts:

• A new delivery model for open source: trusted open source artifacts are continuously rebuilt from source in hardened environments to deliver the latest features, security updates, and performance updates ASAP – while preserving the flexibility for developers to consume these updates on their own cadence. 

• Eliminating engineering toil: Secure container images free up developers from the doom loop of Linux administration and vulnerability patching so they can spend more time on revenue-generating product and platform development.

• A secure foundation for open source: Minimal, hardened, and vulnerability-free open source reduces alert fatigue, mitigates breach risks, and ensures the protection of critical assets like IP and customer data. 

• Simplifying continuous compliance: Secure artifacts solve critical compliance controls by default so teams can shrink audit timelines, unlock new revenue streams, and eliminate non-compliance risk – all without diverting resources from product delivery. 

• Accelerating revenue: Secure and compliant open source empowers developers to ship revenue-generating capabilities faster, meet stringent customer requirements, and meet tight roadmap deadlines.

Limitations of Traditional Open Source Delivery Models

When we talk to engineering and security teams across our customer base, we hear a similar story about the shortcomings of legacy open source delivery models and the tensions it causes between these two groups:

• Outdated, slow-moving distributions gate security patches from downstream developers, requiring manual intervention that is costly and time-consuming.

• Bloated artifacts bury teams in scanner noise while obscuring the true security risks.

• Poor security and non-compliance spark last-minute scrambles to satisfy policy.

• Engineering tries to compensate with “golden” artifacts, but rebuilds are not frequent enough, the limited scope pushes developers off the paved path, and the cycle begins again.

As a result, security is chasing down vulnerabilities, silencing noisy scanners, and processing policy exceptions without any real path to proactive prevention. Engineering is devoting countless hours and costly resources to updating software, remediating vulnerabilities, and regression testing.

This approach consumes both sides, breeding frustration, and distracting from product and platform development. Without a proactive approach to deploy secure-by-design open source artifacts, this cycle repeats constantly.

A New Approach to Secure-by-Design Open Source

We wrote this Buyer’s Guide for security and engineering leaders who are tired of fighting legacy distributions, and are re-thinking how they can consume secure-by-design open source artifacts. In this guide, we’ll show you how to choose a Secure Container Images solution that has the right capabilities to secure, operationalize, and maintain your production environments. And because not all solutions are created equal, we identify the key capabilities that define a cutting edge vendor – from end-to-end supply chain contracts, a contractual CVE remediation SLA, an offering of secure artifacts with the depth and breadth to meet the needs of every developer, and more.

Get Started with the Buyer’s Guide Today

Chainguard has built a catalog of 1,400+ minimal, zero-CVE container images that complement your existing golden images program and provide a path to standardizing on a single safe source for all the open source your engineering teams need.

And we’re not stopping there — after all, you can’t be the safe source for open source without covering every layer of the modern operating stack. That’s we’ve broadened our product suite for trusted open source artifacts to include Chainguard Libraries and Chainguard VMs.

Download the guide today, and see what the right Trusted Container Images and Trusted Open Source Artifacts solution looks like for your business.