u/Fuzzy-Teaching7112

Standing up a build platform on rootless podman, gov-adjacent customer that scans everything to death, so I needed hardened base images and went looking for a Chainguard alternative rather than defaulting to the pricey incumbent. Tried these.

Chainguard is well known, Wolfi based, built from source, low CVE, tooling is the best of the three, pulls into podman fine because it's just OCI. Downside was cost, the quote for the breadth we wanted was not small for a small team.

On docker hardened images its newer, minimal, SBOM and provenance attached, and being docker the distribution is pretty easy. Though the catalog felt thinner when we looked, and considering docs assume Docker, I spent an hour proving it worked headless, It did.

Minimus was the one I hadn't used. The whole catalog is free to pull with no account and could test against the customer's scanners before committing. It had FIPS and STIG tagged images the customer wants. Their stated caveat is free tier has no SLA and paid can get patches first.

None of the three fix debugging a minimal image, that's ephemeral containers or a dev variant either way. On rootless podman all worked once I stopped following the Docker flavored quickstarts. If you've run any of these headless at scale, what should I expect?

Had a weird one last month. One of our services pulled in a package I had never heard of, 11 stars on GitHub, one maintainer, last commit over a year ago, and it was running in a container before anyone had asked a single question about it. Turned out an assistant suggested it for one helper function, dev just took the suggestion.

A lot of our manifests and dependency files are getting written or edited by AI now, and the AI supply chain security side of it is no one's actual job. No one is checking whether a library got picked by a person who vetted it or hallucinated into a requirements file because it sounded plausible. In a cluster the blast radius of one bad dependency is not small.

We scan container images for known CVEs but that catches bad versions of things we already know about, not a sketchy new package doing exactly what it says on a label no one read.

Right now there is basically nothing between an assistant picking a package and that package running in prod, and that feels like something I should have fixed a while ago.

We are a podman shop, rootless, no docker daemon anywhere, and mostly happy about that. But every minimal or hardened image catalog I look at writes its whole quickstart around docker. docker pull this, docker build that, never a word about anything else.

I know OCI is OCI and podman pull should just work. I think I know that. But when a vendor's entire docs assume docker it makes me second-guess whether there is some registry auth step or a docker-specific manifest thing that quietly trips podman up and would rather not find out halfway through wiring it into a build.

Someone mentioned there is a free catalog now that needs no account to pull, which is the part that got my attention, because normally this stuff is a sales call before you can even test it. Have any of you pulled minimal hardened images straight into podman with no docker in the chain at all? Do the compliance-tagged ones behave any differently or is it all just a normal registry pull.

Mostly I want to hear it worked for one real person before I build anything on it.

We are doing due diligence on SAST tools for our enterprise fintech stack and I have realized I do not fully trust our own process. Every vendor clears the checklist. Every one demos flawlessly. In a regulated shop the cost of picking wrong is high and the RFP tells me almost nothing about how the tool behaves on our real mess of legacy services and newer AI written code.

The questions that do not fit neatly in a scorecard: False positive rate on a real codebase, not a demo repo. Whether devs will fix findings or just rubber stamp them to close the audit item. Whether it holds up when the code was generated by an assistant and no one on the team fully understands it.

What do you put a candidate tool through to really separate them?