What do you like best about the product?

Since implementing Chainguard's hardened base images, we've seen a dramatic reduction in vulnerabilities—over 70%. This reduction not only enhances our security posture but also saves our engineering teams an enormous amount of time that would otherwise be spent on vulnerability management and patching. Chainguard's approach introduces excellent security practices out of the box, meaning our engineers no longer have to worry about critical security concerns like rootless containers, proper permissions, and secure registries.

Chainguard sets itself apart by providing supply chain security through purpose-built packages in their registry, making it clear that while competitors might still be playing catch-up in the minor leagues, Chainguard is clearly in a league of its own, setting the standard for supply chain security. We've maximized the value of these images by ensuring reuse across our organization, categorizing images into language-based and application-based groups. This strategy allows us to gain the most value through frequent reuse of language-based images, while our centralized platform engineering teams benefit from using application-specific images at a different scale.

To drive adoption, we've integrated Chainguard images into our centralized internal developer portal, which our developers are already familiar with and use regularly. This seamless integration has significantly boosted adoption rates, further supported by our vulnerability management reduction program. Through this program, we've been able to recommend Chainguard images, reassuring teams that transitioning will save time and energy.

The service level agreements (SLAs) provided by Chainguard are also very attractive. The high speed of image updates ensures that we are always protected with the latest security enhancements. We've even integrated Chainguard into our automatic update tools, so our developers are always confident that they're working with the most up-to-date versions.

Overall, Chainguard's hardened base images have been a game-changer for our organization, providing unparalleled security, efficiency, and peace of mind.

What do you dislike about the product?

The documentation at times fall a little behind and the modern authentication mechanisms at times can create difficulties in integrating with other existing platforms that are not yet supportive of technologies like OIDC. Quite a few of the images require rework to convert from a standard Dockerhub image however, I believe that's expected.

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

Reducing container, image, vulnerabilities and creating a solid secure base to build upon