I work at Chainguard, happy to answer any questions!
I still have no idea what Chainguard is, or what those images do. All I know is those images are "hardened", is that the only thing they're for? Is that Chainguard's product?
I think this comes down to audience. To a lot of engineers it's just like ... "OK, that's nice. What else?"
But for security teams in large enterprises, Chainguard is like manna from heaven. They immediately understand what is really being sold: the elimination of enormous amounts of compulsory toil due to upgrading vulnerable software -- or having to nag other teams to do it.
It's a bit like visiting the site of a medical devices manufacturer. I probably don't know what the device does, but the target audience sure do.
Explain to me how Chainguard helps with this. Everywhere I've worked, this process has very specific needs depending on the companies internal and regulatory requirements. Chainguard may help with proof of origin/base imaging, but it doesn't do much beyond what container registries and tools like dependabot/snyk/dependency track already provide (not saying they're directly related), which doesn't really reduce that much toil.
Most of our customers use them for FedRAMP or IL 5/6 stuff out of the box.
If it helps, substitute "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" instead.
In a nutshell we produce minimal container images with a low CVE count. In many cases they should be drop in replacements for the containers you are currently using.
This is particularly useful if your team uses a scanner like trivy/snyk/grype/Docker Scout and spends time investigating CVEs. Less CVES == less time investigating. It can also be critical in regulated environments.
For example, put that exact sentence in place of this useless tag line:
> Build it right. Build it safe. Build it fast.
Why does the article present this bizarre set of instructions for grabbing the image instead of linking directly? You could just link your organization no?
> Getting started with Chainguard Developer Images in Docker Hub is easy. Follow these simple steps:
> Look up the Image you want.
> Select ‘Recently Updated’ from the dropdown menu on the right.
> Filter out the community images by selecting the filter ‘Verified Publisher.’
> Copy the pull command, paste it into your terminal, and you are all set.
We produce SBOMs during the build process, and cryptographically sign SLSA-formatted provenance artifacts depicting the entire build process so you can trace a built container all the way back to the sources it was built from.
We also try to make as much of our build system reproducible as possible (but we're not all the way there yet), so you can audit or rebuild the process yourself.