Chainguard Container for cilium-envoy

Cilium-envoy is a specialized Envoy proxy used by Cilium for Layer 7 policy enforcement and service mesh functionality.

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/cilium-envoy:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Compatibility Notes

This image is comparable to the quay.io/cilium/cilium-envoy image. Switching to the Chainguard image should not require any changes to your existing Cilium deployment.

cilium-envoy runs as root by default

Matching the public counterpart image, the Chainguard image runs as root by default.

If you need to use a non-root user, specify 1337 as the runAsUser in the cilium Helm chart:

# values.yaml

envoy:
  podSecurityContext:
    runAsUser: 1337

Getting Started

Docker

The cilium-envoy container requires specific Linux capabilities to function properly:

docker run --rm \
  --cap-add=NET_ADMIN \
  --cap-add=SYS_ADMIN \
  --cap-add=BPF \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/cilium-envoy:latest cilium-envoy --version

Kubernetes/Helm

Cilium-envoy is typically deployed as part of a Cilium installation using Helm. To use the Chainguard image with a Cilium deployment, you can configure the Cilium Helm chart to use the custom image:

1. Create a values.yaml file with the following content:

envoy:
  image:
    override: true
    repository: cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/cilium-envoy
    tag: latest
    pullPolicy: IfNotPresent

2. Install or upgrade Cilium with the custom values:

helm upgrade --install cilium cilium/cilium \
  --namespace kube-system \
  --values values.yaml

Required Capabilities

The cilium-envoy container requires the following Linux capabilities to function properly:

• CAP_NET_ADMIN: Required for network operations
• CAP_SYS_ADMIN or CAP_BPF: Required for BPF operations

These capabilities are necessary for integration with Cilium's datapath and should be provided when running the container.

Documentation and Resources

• Cilium Documentation
• Cilium Proxy Repository

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard Containers are minimal container images that are secure by default.

In many cases, the Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest contain only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager. Chainguard Containers are built with Wolfi, our Linux undistro designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a -dev variant.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they feature additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to leverage the -dev variants, copying application artifacts into a final minimal container that offers a reduced attack surface that won’t allow package installations or logins.

Learn More

To better understand how to work with Chainguard Containers, please visit Chainguard Academy and Chainguard Courses.

In addition to Containers, Chainguard offers VMs and Libraries. Contact Chainguard to access additional products.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.