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's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system 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 development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

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.