goldilocks

packaged by Chainguard

Chainguard Container for goldilocks

A Kubernetes controller and dashboard that recommends CPU and memory requests/limits for your workloads by creating VerticalPodAutoscaler resources in off mode.

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/goldilocks: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 goldilocks image is comparable to the upstream image at us-docker.pkg.dev/fairwinds-ops/oss/goldilocks (built from FairwindsOps/goldilocks). It exposes the same default command path (/goldilocks via a compat symlink to /usr/bin/goldilocks), so the image is a drop-in replacement under docker run and in the upstream Helm chart's image: block.

Compared to upstream:

The Helm chart applies its own securityContext.runAsUser (default 10324), so the in-image user is mainly relevant for plain docker run callers.

Getting Started

Goldilocks is intended to run inside a Kubernetes cluster and requires the Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) CRDs to be installed — it watches VerticalPodAutoscaler resources and emits recommendations rather than auto-resizing workloads. For real recommendations, install metrics-server (or another usage source) alongside it.

Install via Helm

Install Goldilocks using the fairwinds-stable Helm chart, pointing the image at the Chainguard registry:

helm repo add fairwinds-stable https://charts.fairwinds.com/stable
helm repo update

helm upgrade --install goldilocks fairwinds-stable/goldilocks \
  --namespace goldilocks --create-namespace \
  --set image.repository=cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/goldilocks \
  --set image.tag=latest \
  --set vpa.enabled=true \
  --set vpa.updater.enabled=false \
  --set metrics-server.enabled=true

Replace ORGANIZATION with your Chainguard organization. The chart deploys both the controller and the dashboard (a ClusterIP service on port 80).

Enable Goldilocks on a Namespace

Goldilocks only manages namespaces explicitly labelled. Label any namespace you want recommendations for:

kubectl label namespace <my-namespace> goldilocks.fairwinds.com/enabled=true

Within a minute or two the controller will create a VerticalPodAutoscaler (in updateMode: Off) for each Deployment in that namespace.

View Recommendations

Port-forward the dashboard service and open it in a browser:

kubectl port-forward -n goldilocks svc/goldilocks-dashboard 8080:80
# Then visit http://localhost:8080/

Alternatively, use kubectl get vpa -n <my-namespace> -o yaml to inspect the raw recommendations.

Run the Binary Directly

The container can also be used as a CLI (the binary is at both /usr/bin/goldilocks and /goldilocks):

docker run --rm cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/goldilocks:latest version
docker run --rm cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/goldilocks:latest --help

Documentation and Resources

• Goldilocks GitHub repository
• Goldilocks documentation
• fairwinds-stable Helm chart
• Vertical Pod Autoscaler

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.