podinfo-fips

Chainguard Container for podinfo-fips

Podinfo is a tiny web application that provides Go microsrvice template for kubernetes

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/podinfo-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 Podinfo image is built to be compatible with the upstream stefanprodan/podinfo project. The image runs as a non-root user named app with UID 100 and includes the podinfo binary along with the podcli CLI tool.

Like most Chainguard container images, the production variant comes with only the minimum dependencies needed to function and does not include a shell or package manager.

FIPS Compliance

This FIPS-compliant image includes OpenSSL FIPS provider and is built with FIPS-validated cryptographic modules. Key FIPS features include:

• FIPS-validated OpenSSL provider - Uses OpenSSL FIPS provider for cryptographic operations
• Approved algorithms only - Restricted to FIPS-approved cryptographic algorithms
• FIPS mode enforcement - Cryptographic operations automatically use FIPS-validated modules
• Enhanced SSH security - SSH configurations restricted to FIPS-approved ciphers and algorithms

Getting Started

Running with Docker

To run Podinfo with Docker using the default configuration:

docker run -d -p 9898:9898 cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/podinfo:latest

This command starts the Podinfo server on the default HTTP port 9898. You can verify that it's running by accessing the web interface:

curl http://localhost:9898

You should see a response containing "greetings from podinfo".

Testing HTTP Endpoints

Podinfo provides several built-in endpoints for testing and monitoring:

# Homepage
curl http://localhost:9898/

# Health check endpoint
curl http://localhost:9898/healthz

# Readiness probe endpoint
curl http://localhost:9898/readyz

# Generate a token (POST request)
curl -X POST http://localhost:9898/token

Enabling gRPC Support

Podinfo also supports gRPC. To enable the gRPC server, you can specify the gRPC port when starting the container:

docker run -d -p 9898:9898 -p 9999:9999 \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/podinfo:latest \
  --grpc-port=9999

You can then test the gRPC endpoints using grpcurl:

# Check gRPC health
grpcurl -plaintext localhost:9999 grpc.health.v1.Health/Check

# Get service info
grpcurl -plaintext -d '{}' localhost:9999 info.InfoService/Info

Command-Line Options

The podinfo binary supports various configuration flags. You can view all available options:

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

To check the version:

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

Kubernetes Deployment

Using Helm

Podinfo can be easily deployed to Kubernetes using the official Helm chart:

helm install podinfo oci://ghcr.io/stefanprodan/charts/podinfo \
  --set image.repository=cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/podinfo \
  --set image.tag=latest

This will deploy Podinfo with all necessary Kubernetes resources including Services, Deployments, and optional Ingress configurations.

Use Cases

Podinfo is commonly used for:

• Testing Kubernetes deployments: Demonstrating pod lifecycle, service discovery, and networking
• GitOps workflows: Serving as a demo application for continuous deployment with Flux or Argo CD
• Service mesh validation: Testing service mesh features like traffic splitting and observability
• Cloud-native best practices: Learning about health checks, metrics, logging, and tracing
• Load testing: Generating consistent workloads for infrastructure testing

Documentation and Resources

• Official Podinfo GitHub Repository
• Podinfo Helm Chart
• Flux GitOps Toolkit Documentation — Podinfo is frequently used in Flux examples

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.