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Istio is a service mesh that extends Kubernetes to provide traffic management, telemetry, security, and policy for complex deployments.
Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.
For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev
:
Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION
placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.
Istio is an open-source service mesh platform that provides a uniform way to secure, connect, and monitor microservices. Built on the high-performance Envoy proxy, Istio manages traffic flow between services, enforces access policies, and gathers telemetry data without requiring changes to application code. The service mesh architecture enables organizations to manage complex distributed systems with enhanced security, observability, and traffic management capabilities.
Chainguard offers several Istio images that provide the core components needed for a complete service mesh deployment:
Istio Pilot serves as the core control plane component responsible for service discovery and configuration distribution throughout the mesh. This component performs several critical functions:
The Istio proxy is built on the Envoy proxy and acts as a sidecar container deployed alongside each application workload. This component provides the data plane functionality:
The Istio CNI (Container Network Interface) plugin eliminates the need for elevated privileges (NET_ADMIN capability) during sidecar injection:
These images can be used by overriding the default image values in the official Istio Helm charts.
First, add the Istio Helm repository:
Then install Istio using a single helm install
command. Below is a basic example installing the Istio base, control plane, and CNI plugin.
values.yaml
If you prefer to keep your customizations in a file instead of long --set
strings, create a small values.yaml
for each chart you install.
istiod-values.yaml
Install:
istio-cni-values.yaml
Install:
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:
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.
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.
Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.
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.
Chainguard container images contain software packages that are direct or transitive dependencies. The following licenses were found in the "latest" tag of this image:
Apache-2.0
GCC-exception-3.1
GPL-2.0-or-later
GPL-3.0-or-later
LGPL-2.1-or-later
MIT
MPL-2.0
For a complete list of licenses, please refer to this Image's SBOM.
Software license agreementA FIPS validated version of this image is available for FedRAMP compliance. STIG is included with FIPS image.