Minimus container images are now free

ddimastopel about 4 hours ago 52 commentsRead Article on images.minimus.io

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Discussion Sentiment

76% Positive

Analyzed from 1798 words in the discussion.

Discussion (52 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

charukiewicz•about 2 hours ago

Completely blocking the image information page to mobile user agents is completely unnecessary. I'd much rather look at your non optimized page than be told to come back on desktop.

Moreover, even after switching to desktop mode on my phone, there's nothing I see that precludes you from employing a little bit of CSS to make those pages render more nicely on mobile screens.

jjice•about 2 hours ago

Seriously. I get the sibling comment seemingly from someone involved talking about eng resources being tight, but blocking it instead of just showing a desktop page feels absurd.

nikanj•about 1 hour ago

Takes more eng resources to block mobile than not

morellonet•about 2 hours ago

Fair complaint. As with all software development we make tradeoffs to try to balance time and capability. I’ll make sure our front end lead see this though :)

hobofan•about 3 hours ago

Asking the very obvious question (as it's not apparent from the website): Why would I use this over DHI (Docker Hardened Images) or Chainguard Images, both of which also have a set of free hardened images?

morellonet•about 3 hours ago

1. These are all >1200 of our images, including FIPS, and all versions… others gate many of their images

2. These are all built continuously from upstream source on a distroless base… this makes a significant difference in attack surface and CVE count re DHI images and you can easily check our word with a few scans

3. These are truly free… no auth wall, no signup, no trial, no limit on numbers of images or pulls or anything like that

4. We have really invested in making these agent ready… we have a CLI (minicli) designed for both humans and agents to easily discover, understand, migrate to, and build on them… for example, check out the AI migration prompts we provide for each image, we’ve refined these across many customer deployments such that you can copy paste into your agent of choice, point it at a Dockerfile and have it do all / nearly all the work to move to these images

pixl97•about 2 hours ago

>are all built continuously from upstream source

2. Isn't there a slight risk of upstream attacks being amplified by this? With the recent number of software compromises providing a way for people to use images X days old may be useful.

3. This ties into 2, if someone downloads and uses an image that is later found to be compromised they mostly have no way of being notified that happened. Not a huge issue, but is something that should be risk assessed.

hobofan•28 minutes ago

> 2. Isn't there a slight risk of upstream attacks being amplified by this?

I think the argument would be that consuming Minimus' containers would have a less severe amplification (or even reduction), as all upstream attacks that rely on a combination of third-party vulnerabilities would be rendered infeasible (since they reduce the amount of third-party dependencies in an image).

> 3. This ties into 2, if someone downloads and uses an image that is later found to be compromised they mostly have no way of being notified that happened.

For this you need a consumption-aware scanner anyways (e.g. that lists images running in your Kubernetes). Anything else will be too spammy, as you can't notify for everything for you have at some point in time have used as a base image.

s_ting765•about 1 hour ago

Pausing software updates by X days old is a hack at best for specific distribution platforms (npm), not a general security recommendation.

AmazingTurtle•about 1 hour ago

how can one be sure you don't do rugpull in the future?

ramon156•about 2 hours ago

The question was "why over DHI?"

1 and 2 are not a reason

3. no X, no Y, also not a reason

4. `rg agents`. Right

morellonet•about 2 hours ago

Not sure what you mean… we have more images than DHI, we have FIPS images available freely, and all our images are built from source on a distroless base. These are just objective facts.

The build from source on distroless approach provides a meaningful advantage re attack surface and CVEs versus DHI images. You don’t have to take our word for it, just pull some images and scan with Trivy or Grype or whatever you prefer.

yjftsjthsd-h•about 2 hours ago

3 is exactly the reason I've never bothered to try docker's offering; that definitely is a reason

phishin•about 3 hours ago

Agreed. Also on front page the nginx container is 6 days old, so no daily builds

morellonet•about 3 hours ago

We build anytime any component within an image has a new upstream version. If there’s no new upstream versions, no reason to build.

Check out the changelog tab in each image listing and you can see exactly when and why we build each time

zufallsheld•about 3 hours ago

Where are these built? Can I see the Dockerfiles? How are they licensed? I get that they are free as in beer, but not libre/FLOSS?

morellonet•about 3 hours ago

Currently, yes free as in beer. We build every component directly from source in a SLSA 3 environment we run (mostly in GCP). Making the Dockerfiles available is a fair question, not something we’ve done thus far because it’s not particularly useful if you don’t have all the infrastructure building the components.

Do you have particular scenarios you’d like the Dockerfiles for or is it just for transparency/ trust (which is a totally valid reason of course)?

zufallsheld•about 2 hours ago

> Do you have particular scenarios you’d like the Dockerfiles for or is it just for transparency/ trust (which is a totally valid reason of course)?

The latter. You or an attacker could tamper with the images - however even with the Dockerfiles I can't be sure that the provided images are built from the Dockerfiles, so in the end I'd have to trust you anyway. Also I'd be curious how you build the images.

Thanks for your answer!

morellonet•about 2 hours ago

Totally get it… practically if you don’t want to have to deal with constantly updating images you have to have some degree of trust in whomever you get them from… that said, we try to be as transparent as possible with a cryptographically verifiable SBOM for every build of every image, signing every image, providing detailed compliance test results for FIPS, STIG, CIS (see the compliance tab on each image listing)

Your feedback about Dockerfiles is good though and probably something we can easily add to image listings. I opened an issue for us to add.

Note that we also make our package manager freely available in Community Edition as well, which can make the Dockerfile availability more useful.

cedws•about 2 hours ago

Since we started paying for Chainguard I’ve become super sold on the benefits of minimal and continually patched images. It’s just a shame that the open source community only gets to benefit from the limited free library DHI and Chainguard offer. I understand it costs money though and that needs to come from somewhere.

morellonet•about 2 hours ago

This is exactly why we’ve made Community Edition free. The value of hardened, well maintained images to the world writ large is huge.

We believe there is sufficient value to enterprises in the SLAs and broader feature set to build a great business while making the core benefit available to everyone without friction.

figassis•about 3 hours ago

The free tiers always go away, after they're deep in our infra. I would prefer to price it from the start.

morellonet•about 3 hours ago

We would be happy to sell it to you today! :)

This is our new Community Edition, which are all the exact same images as the Enterprise Edition product customers around the world already use, just without all the other features like image creator, self hosting, integrations, SSO, etc. Click the discover Enterprise Edition button on lower left and you can see a quick comparison table or go to minimus.io to see all the details.

EE also includes contractually backed CVE remediation and support SLAs. If you’d like to try EE and get pricing details, we’d be happy to help! Just click the button on the lower left to get started.

morellonet•about 3 hours ago

John here (CTO and Co-Founder)… we’d be happy to answer any questions anyone has!

BIGFOOT_EXISTS•about 1 hour ago

Is there a single upstream that all images are based on? Debian? Arch? Alpine?

Curious how this plays into customizing images with creator, are you guys responsible for all the packaging?

Would my keester be on the line if say an upstream package got hit with an attack but I use it through creator?

morellonet•14 minutes ago

1. Distroless base. Imagine an effectively empty filesystem that only includes the components needed to run the app. The package manager we use is apk from Alpine and we make our full package universe of >10,000 packages available freely to Community Edition users. If you want a more 'normal' experience with a shell and apk, use the -dev versions of images that are still minimalistic but include a little more tooling like this.

2. For creator, you're basically taking any image from our public gallery and able to add whatever other packages from our universe to it, set env vars, upload files (customers typically use this for adding conf files and certificates). Then we maintain that image 'recipe' for you continuously, under the same SLAs we do all the public images. More details at https://docs.minimus.io/enterprise-edition/image-creator#ima...

3. Nope :) We are building every package across our universe continuously. Whenever there's a new version of any of them, we pull source, build package, compute what images (including creator ones) use that package, rebuild those images, test, sign.

ftchd•about 3 hours ago

Just a little bit of feedback: some items on the main page are duplicated, which could be confusing. For example, "nginx-advanced" appears as updated both 3 days ago and 2 hours ago.

morellonet•about 3 hours ago

One of those is the image, one is a Helm chart using that image. The chart has an label and icon for chart but obviously we need to make this clearer :)

Thanks for the feedback!

miyuru•about 3 hours ago

Any plans to add IPv6 support? NAT GW are costly and docker hub has full support.

currently reg.mini.dev does not have AAAA records. Did not check the blob storage endpoints.

morellonet•about 3 hours ago

Certainly something we can add, just not something any customers have wanted thus far.

reg.mini.dev is really a front end to Google Artifact Registry which already supports v6. I opened an issue for our devops team to enable it for us.

Thanks for the feedback!

2OEH8eoCRo0•about 1 hour ago

Supply chain attack waiting to happen

kitd•3 minutes ago

How? If this, then so is DHI.

alfanick•about 1 hour ago

Maybe it's their business model? Sell to bunch of people and hook them in, then "get hacked", whoops sorry.

Edit: honestly I'm flagging this post. This really looks like fishing for customers to make them vulnerable in future.

morellonet•9 minutes ago

Not sure what you mean here. We have many enterprise customers, in industries including government, health care, financial services around the world. The whole value of the product is helping them avoid all the risk and work associated with poorly maintained container images. We publish a full SBOM for every image so you can see exactly what's inside of it. We've worked across the industry and OSS communities to enable scanning support as well, so you can easily use whatever scanning tools you currently use (e.g. Wiz, AWS Inspector, Grype, etc) to check our images.

cedws•39 minutes ago

What are you even talking about?

crabique•about 3 hours ago

Is their ingress-nginx-controller image similar to that of Chainguard: a drop-in replacement with the CVEs fixed?

greggsy•about 2 hours ago

I see this is a packaging service with greater traceability and velocity than the rando images on docker hub.

I believe that they will always supply the bleeding edge stable release, but it will always be your responsibility to monitor and manage issues like CVEs, rather than expecting them to do it for you.

stamod1•31 minutes ago

yes it is

alfanick•about 1 hour ago

I truly don't get this. What is the security policy here? Why should I trust images built by minimus.io? How do I know they don't contain malicious software? What's the point?

morellonet•about 1 hour ago

We build all these images directly from upstream source across thousands of projects and assemble them into standard OCI images for you. We do this continuously, every time there are new versions released upstream.

The point is that you can just use these images instead of what you already have and reduce your vulnerabilities by 97%+ on average.

Think Docker Hub, just without the vulnerabilities.

alfanick•about 1 hour ago

Pinky promise? How do you prove that what I download from you is actually what you promise you've build (and that SBOM is right)? Is this certified with some digital signature?

From my threat attack model, you're just yet another liability - one single service to hack all your "safe" images.

concerned_ctzn•about 1 hour ago

good job!

tuananh•about 1 hour ago

this space is too crowded now. everyone is copying whatever Chainguard is doing

- Chainguard Images

- Chainguard Libraries

- Chainguard VM

...

cedws•39 minutes ago

Because Chainguard cost an arm and a leg.

tamimio•about 2 hours ago

I have no idea what the heck is this, maybe it’s a great product but a very poor website in telling what I am getting into, is this better than the usual containers? How? Supported platforms? Can I run it on arm? The usuals

morellonet•about 1 hour ago

It’s a library of near 0 CVE images available to use for free. Think Docker Hub, just without vulnerabilities.

They’re all normal, OCI compliant images. You can pull them, run them, and build on them like you would any other image.

arm64 and amd64 builds for everything

alfanick•about 1 hour ago

> just without vulnerabilities

You surely mean "without known and reported vulnerabilities". I doubt you're proactively fixing the world across thousands of software packages /s

sara_halper•about 1 hour ago

Minimus images support both amd64 and arm64. When you run the docker pull command, it will automatically pull the correct architecture for your system.

You can also review the different SBOMs for the amd64 and arm64 images, for example - https://images.minimus.io/gallery/images/python-fips/lines/3...

assafShapira•about 1 hour ago

yes all the images have ARM64 versions as well as x86_64

qwer123vbtf•about 4 hours ago

noice!