Chainguard Container for k6-operator

Kubernetes operator for running distributed k6 performance tests

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/k6-operator:latest

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

Compatibility Notes

The Chainguard k6-operator image is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the upstream grafana/k6-operator image, with the following characteristics:

• This image uses three components available via tags:
  • latest or controller-v* - The k6-operator controller
  • latest-starter or starter-v* - The test initializer/starter pod
  • latest-runner or runner-v* - The k6 test runner pod
• All components are minimal, distroless images with low-to-zero CVEs
• For FIPS-compliant environments, see k6-operator-fips.

Getting Started

Helm Installation

Add the Grafana Helm repository and install the k6 Operator:

helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update
helm install k6-operator grafana/k6-operator \
  --set image.repository=cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/k6-operator \
  --set image.tag=latest

Be sure to replace ORGANIZATION with your organization's name in the Chainguard Registry.

Then create a TestRun resource using the Chainguard runner and starter images:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: k6.io/v1alpha1
kind: TestRun
metadata:
  name: k6-sample
spec:
  parallelism: 2
  script:
    configMap:
      name: k6-test
      file: test-script.js
  runner:
    image: cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/k6-operator:latest-runner
  starter:
    image: cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/k6-operator:latest-starter
EOF

Configuration

You can configure default runner and starter images at the Helm chart level to avoid specifying them in every TestRun:

helm install k6-operator grafana/k6-operator \
  --set image.repository=cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/k6-operator \
  --set image.tag=latest \
  --set customImages.runner=cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/k6-operator:latest-runner \
  --set customImages.starter=cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/k6-operator:latest-starter

This configuration ensures all TestRuns use Chainguard images by default unless explicitly overridden in the TestRun specification.

For advanced configuration options including resource limits, parallelism settings, and test execution parameters, refer to the official k6 Operator documentation.

Documentation and Resources

• Run k6 scripts with TestRun CRD
• Running k6
• Using k6

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.