u/InflationCorrect5244

Fine-tuned classification model, self-hosted, feeding a customer-facing flow. Every infra metric we track stayed healthy for three straight weeks. A support ticket is what actually told us something was wrong, a customer said the categorization felt off. Precision had drifted noticeably and nothing on any dashboard showed it.

The gap is specific. We observe the service, is it up, is it fast, but not the model, are its outputs still correct. Those are different signals and we'd conflated them. For teams who've built this out, what's the actual signal you alert on versus just review weekly?

Trying to put together a list of solid free or open hardened image providers for a write up. A few keep coming up, free hardened, minimal images that are rebuilt continuously to stay near zero CVE, with no account needed to pull.

What else belongs on this list? Looking specifically for projects or services that are actually open or free to use long term rather than free tier then paywall, and ideally ones with transparent rebuild and provenance practices. Bonus points if you've compared a few side by side.

We are mid-refresh on our edge stack. so The requirement that broke our old shortlist is inline inspection of GenAI traffic. We need decryption and enforcement in path, not logging after the fact.

What we are scoring vendors on right now:

• TLS inspection at line rate without a separate proxy tier bolted on
• Whether AI/LLM destinations are a first-class app category or just a URL filter list someone maintains
• Where inspection physically happens: PoP-local or hairpinned to a regional hub
• Added RTT for a user in APAC hitting a US-hosted model endpoint
• Whether the policy engine is the same one handling our normal web/DLP policy or a separate console

The last one is where most of the demos fall apart. Two vendors showed us "AI security" that turned out to be a different product with its own policy syntax and its own logs.

Anyone actually running inline GenAI inspection in production at 1000+ users? Curious what your measured latency delta looks like, and whether you had to carve out exceptions for anything. Copilot in the IDE has been our worst offender.

Agentless is the right fit for pre-deployment. Images, manifests, RBAC, secrets, drift. Low overhead. It works well in CI/CD and admission control. But runtime is a different problem. Pods spin up, scale out, and die faster than most scan cycles. If something gets compromised and terminates before the next scan, agentless never sees it.

So the pattern I keep seeing succeed is agentless as the gatekeeper, plus eBPF or an agent-based watcher for high-value workloads. Serverless and service mesh make that messy as well. The real question is whether anyone is running fully agentless in production and actually trusting their runtime visibility, or whether hybrid is the only realistic answer.