Chainguard Images - GovCloud

What do you like best about the product?

They offer a very strong security SLA, and it has helped us reduce a significant portion of our vulnerability surface and overall exposure.

What do you dislike about the product?

Getting adoption going across the organization can be a challenge, especially since there are a fair number of exceptions and special cases to account for.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Vulnerability remediation helps us stay in compliance, maintaining the required performance in our complaince metrics, intergrating with our artifactory, at a resonable roi for the SLA

What do you like best about the product?

We use the Chainguard FIPs containers for compliance with some of our government customers. It is relatively seamless to plug-and-play our applications into the Chainguard FIPs image and have it just work. We integrate the Chainguard repo into our Jfrog artifactory and that makes the docker image pull process pretty consistent across the other processes at our company.

What do you dislike about the product?

The pricing structure is a bit harsh. The cost-per image is pretty significant and we've made some engineering mistakes where we purchased an image, realized we didn't actually need it, and just wasted a bunch of money on nothing.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Chainguard is helping us accelerate both the migration of our existing commercial products and the development of new products for our government customers who require FIPs encryption.

Without Chainguard, we would have had to spend many more engineering hours addressing security vulnerabilities and enabling FIPs mode in our containers and Python applications.

What do you like best about the product?

Their base image support is notable: the images are lean and mostly free from CVEs. They also provide a high range of possibilities and FIPS compliance.

What do you dislike about the product?

Their UI for reviewing CVE patches feels overwhelming and makes it difficult to locate results for specific packages. The CLI's login flow also lacks clear documentation. Finally, they now rely more on upstream patches for CVE fixes than they did previously, which may be a consequence of the wider range of technologies they support.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

As many of our customers scan our products for CVEs and we have a docker based product it is essential that we have near zero CVEs in our base images, which provides a significant ROI even though the somewhat high licensing price.

What do you like best about the product?

At first, I assumed it would be more like, “oh, they’ll make my life easier with CVEs.” But after using the service, I’ve found the real strength is the ability to build custom images that include the packages and libraries you actually need. In a lot of architectures you end up with plenty of one-off images, and with Chainguard you can replace those with their CVE-hardened versions.

What do you dislike about the product?

This isn’t a complaint, and I know it’s already on their roadmap, but I’d really like to see STIG and FIPS VMs offered in addition to their container images. That would help a lot with on-prem infrastructure, especially if I could swap out all the OSs on my bare-metal servers and OpenStack VMs.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Time.

The open source images, as well as the base images we use for our own applications, create a large attack surface. We can remediate issues ourselves by swapping libraries, patching images, or forking upstream, but it turns into a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Chainguard changes that by letting me continuously update and address CVEs across all of our images, in seconds rather than hours.

Also the price point for their product catalog is more than worth it if you consider the worth of several engineers consistently focusing (and repeating) on CVE tasks.

What do you like best about the product?

Chainguard's security-first approach, combined with the expertise of their engineering team, has been the most valuable aspect of our partnership. Their minimal, hardened container images and FIPS-compliant libraries have helped simplify our FedRAMP readiness efforts while reducing software supply chain risk. We also appreciate their responsiveness, technical knowledge, and willingness to work collaboratively to resolve implementation challenges and support our engineering teams.

What do you dislike about the product?

We have no significant concerns at this time and have been pleased with our overall experience working with Chainguard.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Chainguard is helping us strengthen our software supply chain security while accelerating our FedRAMP readiness. Their hardened container images and FIPS-compliant cryptographic libraries reduce the effort required to build and maintain secure container images, simplify compliance with federal security requirements, and help minimize vulnerabilities in our software stack. This allows our engineering teams to focus on delivering product capabilities while improving the security and integrity of our containerized workloads.

What do you like best about the product?

As a DevSecOps engineer, the best part of Chainguard is being able to get secure, hardened container images off the shelf. Before Chainguard, I had to maintain my own images and write custom scripts to remove certain binaries, or build my own images from scratch to reduce vulnerabilities. That created a lot of toil, especially when it came to keeping everything up to date. Now I can start from images that are already designed with security in mind, which cuts down on vulnerability noise and saves me time. I don’t use the UI much, so for me the main value is the core functionality: reliable, low-vulnerability images that make secure container workflows much easier to maintain.

What do you dislike about the product?

Some images that are directly derived from other sources, like Bitnami, end up with entrypoints that differ from the originals. On top of that, some Helm charts don’t provide a way to customize the container’s ENTRYPOINT or CMD. In certain cases, this leaves me having to maintain my own image (using Chainguard’s image as a base) solely to adjust the ENTRYPOINT.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

This is kind of obvious question - it helps me maintain secure environment. It is also extremely helpful in case of certifications like SOC2 or deployments to restricted environments.

What do you like best about the product?

Having someone else manage security patches is quite valuable to my small team.

What do you dislike about the product?

Sometimes unclear how vulnerabilities are triaged or resolved in a timely fashion. Some of the underlying compatibility shims play havok with our security scanners.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Keeping our containers free from vulnerabilities lets us present a strong security posture to auditors and customers.

What do you like best about the product?

The fast CVE remediation requires a minimal images.
The well-thought-out authentication flow for CLI and a simple, but complete interface.

What do you dislike about the product?

The login flow is generally fine, but from time to time I get a “something went wrong” message on the Auth0 page. It doesn’t happen often, and it’s not a big deal.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

They allow us to lower our CVE count, which is the main advantage of using Chainguard images.
Before, while using public Docker images, we couldn't hit 0 CVE; it was impossible. Chainguard made it possible

What do you like best about the product?

Reducing CVEs is obviously important, but even more so are the people who work there and the support they provide. They genuinely care about helping their clients get the most out of their products and services.

What do you dislike about the product?

Honestly, I cant think of anything that I dislike about them.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Chainguard provides hardened container images that dramatically reduce our CVE exposure. It cuts down the vulnerability noise our team has to triage, letting us focus on shipping product instead of chasing base image issues.

What do you like best about the product?

The CVE reduction we’ve seen with Chainguard images has been a huge lift for us. The UI offers robust functionality, and it’s well supported by Chainguard’s tooling and integration points. The documentation is excellent, and the team has been amazing—especially Eric and Gem.

What do you dislike about the product?

Generally don't have anything to share around dislikes.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Improved supply chain security posture, minimized images, etc.