Chainguard Image for elastic-agent-fips

Elastic Agent is a unified agent for collecting, monitoring, and securing data across systems in the Elastic Stack.

Chainguard Images are regularly-updated, minimal container images with low-to-zero CVEs.

Download this Image

This image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/elastic-agent-fips:latest

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

Compatibility Notes

Chainguard's elastic-agent-fips image is comparable to the external elastic-agent image, with the following key differences:

• The Chainguard image does not include the following binaries (normally located in /usr/share/elastic-agent/data/elastic-agent-buildhash/components/):
  • cloud-defend
  • endpoint-security
  • osqueryd
  • pf-elastic-collector
  • pf-elastic-symbolizer
  • pf-host-agent
• The Chainguard image does not store its binaries in /usr/share/elastic-agent/data/elastic-agent-buildhash/components/. Instead, it symlinks them from /usr/bin.

Chainguard Images are regularly updated, minimal container images with low-to-zero CVEs.

Getting Started

The elastic-agent-fips image can be deployed using the official Elastic Agent Helm chart alongside the ECK Operator.

Start by retrieving credentials from an Elastic Agent deployment

PASSWORD=$(kubectl get secrets quickstart-es-elastic-user -o json |jq -r .data.elastic |base64 -d)
ES_API_KEY=$(kubectl exec -it quickstart-es-default-0 -n default -- \
curl -k -u elastic:$PASSWORD -s -X POST "https://localhost:9200/_security/api_key" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d '{"name":"my-api-key","role_descriptors":{"custom_role":{"cluster":["all"],"index":[{"names":["*"],"privileges":["all"]}]}}}' | jq -r .api_key)

Next, create a values.yaml file:

kubernetes:
  enabled: true

outputs:
  elasticsearch:
    type: ESPlainAuthAPI
    url: https://quickstart-es-http:9200
    username: elastic
    password: "$PASSWORD"
    api_key: "$ES_API_KEY"
  default:
    url: https://quickstart-es-http:9200
    username: elastic

    password: "$PASSWORD"
agent:
  imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
  image:
    repository: "<YOUR_IMAGE_REGISTRY>"
    tag: "<YOUR_IMAGE_TAG>"

Finally, deploy the elastic-agent Helm chart using the values.yaml file:

git clone https://github.com/elastic/elastic-agent.git
helm install demo ./elastic-agent/deploy/helm/elastic-agent -f values.yaml

Documentation and Resources

Refer to the official Elastic Agent documentation for more information.

Contact Support

If you have a Zendesk account (typically set up for you by your Customer Success Manager) you can reach out to Chainguard's Customer Success team through our Zendesk portal.

What are Chainguard Images?

Chainguard Images are a collection of container images designed for security and minimalism.

Many Chainguard Images are distroless; they contain only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These images do not even contain a shell or package manager. Chainguard Images are built with Wolfi, our Linux undistro designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Images include:

• Minimal design, with no unnecessary software bloat
• Automated nightly builds to ensure Images are completely up-to-date and contain all available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs (software bills of materials) attesting the provenance of all artifacts within the Image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

-dev Variants

As mentioned previously, Chainguard’s distroless Images have no shell or package manager by default. This is great for security, but sometimes you need these things, especially in builder images. For those cases, most (but not all) Chainguard Images come paired with a -dev variant which does include a shell and package manager.

Although the -dev image variants have similar security features as their distroless versions, such as complete SBOMs and signatures, they feature additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. The general recommendation is to use the -dev variants only to build the application and then copy all application artifacts into a distroless image, which will result in a final container image that has a minimal attack surface and won’t allow package installations or logins.

That being said, it’s worth noting that -dev variants of Chainguard Images are completely fine to run in production environments. After all, the -dev variants are still more secure than many popular container images based on fully-featured operating systems such as Debian and Ubuntu since they carry less software, follow a more frequent patch cadence, and offer attestations for what they include.

Learn More

To better understand how to work with Chainguard Images, we encourage you to visit Chainguard Academy, our documentation and education platform.