Chainguard

The premise

Most container CVEs come from packages the application never calls. A standard base image ships a shell, a package manager and dozens of libraries; a scanner flags every known vulnerability in all of them, and a team spends its week triaging findings for code that never executes.

Chainguard attacks this by shipping images with almost nothing in them. Fewer packages means fewer CVEs, and the ones that remain are more likely to matter. The images are built on Wolfi, a distribution designed for this purpose, and come with signed artifacts and SBOMs generated at build time.

What is covered

Containers are the core product. Chainguard Libraries extends the idea to language packages for Python, Java and JavaScript — CVE-patched and malware-resistant builds of dependencies. Chainguard VMs applies it to virtual machine images, and Chainguard Actions provides hardened builds of 1,000+ GitHub Actions.

The commercial commitment behind this is a CVE remediation SLA. Chainguard contracts to patch within a defined window, which is what separates it from simply using Alpine and hoping.

Pricing

Up to five images per organisation are free, enough to test and run something in production. There is also a set of roughly 50 free images carrying only :latest tags — these sit outside the CVE remediation SLA, which is the detail that matters if you were planning to build on them.

Beyond that, Containers are licensed per image or through Catalog access, which starts at $19,000 for a team of 10. Libraries are licensed per language ecosystem by developer count, VMs per image or catalogue, and Actions by compute minutes. Volume, multi-product, startup and public sector discounts exist.

The debugging trade-off

Minimal images have no shell. kubectl exec into a running container to poke around does not work, and the usual debugging reflexes need replacing with ephemeral debug containers and better observability. Teams used to shelling into pods find this genuinely disruptive for the first few incidents.

There is also real vendor dependency here. Base images become something you license rather than pull, and moving off means re-solving the CVE problem yourself.