Chainguard Container for kiali

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/kiali:latest

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

Compatibility Notes

Kiali is a management console for Istio service mesh. It provides graphs, metrics, traces, and validations for your mesh. The Chainguard kiali container image is comparable to the upstream Kiali image. Chainguard's kiali container image was designed with security and minimalism in mind, and there fore doesn't include things like a shell or package manager.

Getting Started

Kiali is typically deployed alongside Istio service mesh using Helm charts or Kubernetes manifests. Kiali requires metrics from Prometheus to function properly. Here's a complete example using Helm charts.

First, add the required Helm repositories:

helm repo add kiali https://kiali.org/helm-charts/
helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts/
helm repo update

Install Prometheus first (required for Kiali to collect metrics):

helm install prometheus prometheus-community/prometheus \
  --namespace kiali \
  --create-namespace

Then install Kiali with Prometheus integration:

helm install kiali kiali/kiali-server \
  --namespace kiali \
  --set auth.strategy=anonymous \
  --set deployment.image_name=cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/kiali \
  --set deployment.image_version=latest \
  --set external_services.prometheus.url=http://prometheus-server.kiali:80

You can then access the Kiali dashboard by port-forwarding:

kubectl -n kiali port-forward svc/kiali 20001:20001

Open http://localhost:20001/kiali in your browser to access the Kiali web interface.

To verify Kiali is working correctly, you can test the API endpoint:

curl -f http://localhost:20001/kiali/api

For production deployments, configure proper authentication instead of using anonymous access:

helm install kiali kiali/kiali-server \
  --namespace kiali \
  --create-namespace \
  --set auth.strategy=openid \
  --set deployment.image_name=cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/kiali \
  --set deployment.image_version=latest \
  --set external_services.prometheus.url=http://prometheus-server.kiali:80

Documentation and Resources

• Official Kiali Documentation
• Kiali GitHub Repository
• Kiali Helm Charts
• Getting Started with Kiali

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.