Setting Docker Hardened Images free

Welcome everyone, I'm Jared and you are listening to The Change Log, where each week we interview the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of the software world. In May 2025, Docker launched Hardend Images, a secure, minimal production-ready set of images, and in December, they made DHI freely available and open source to everyone who built software. On this episode, we are joined by two-star Jan, EVP of Engineering at Docker, to learn all about it. But first a big thank you to our partners at Fly.io, the platform for devs who just want to ship, build fast, run any code, fearlessly, at fly.io.

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So first we have supply chain attacks caused $60 billion in damages in 2025, triple what they caused in 2021. Every language, every ecosystem, every build stuff, they're a target because who does not use Docker. And Docker's response was to make hardened container images free for everyone. We have head of engineering to char here today to dive deep into that, and all the things that come from it.

So welcome to the show. Thank you. It's set to be here. Let me start to talk about all that.

Where we begin in such a deep topic. I mean, you got vendors out there that had products around this. You got the desire to secure the supply chain. You have a brand to protect.

You got developers to protect. You got bills to protect. You got a lot of responsibility. I mean, it's a, it's a big job you have, but where do we begin to unpack the reasoning and decision making behind this choice?

Yeah. Maybe I can, let me talk about how, how we think of supply chain. So I just carry it in our current role in it, and then how that evolved to Docker images, and then eventually why we made it free and how we see that. What exactly is Docker harden images?

We can just explain that too. Perfect. So let's start at the beginning. Before you and that, I'm going to see everyone knows Docker and Docker hub.

Everyone builds containers, you use images. Docker hub is effectively upstream for open source container images. We get billions of billions of polls per month. Everyone pulls from us.

And these are the repositories, our images of like, you know, usable open source software, and not just like upstream base images, but like, you know, I want MySQL on WN. You get that from us. That works great. But we basically keep up with upstream.

As a result, images do have CVs. They've lost the CVs caused by multiple reasons. One, bloated stuff, bloated packages that are built for usability first, as a result of many packages in them, or just, you know, not patching fast enough. Harden images.

And this is a concept that has started the industry before we launch a product, which is, let's first minimize this problem. What people started doing was less scanners in production. They'll see when there's a CV, we'll go alert some teams, they'll have to go update and patch, and this is the sort of the world they lived in. Instead, why do we need all these images?

Can we first minimize them? Let's get minimal packages that are only what we need. Second, can we have someone patch these faster, and then we drive that? So we release the border on engineering teams.

This is not the movement that started. It's very natural for doctors to do this. And so we launched our own images as a paid product already last year. It's a harden to images, base images, app images that are minimal, low to no cities, back when it's lit by us.

When we launched, we had a limited catalog, and we've been aggressively growing that. Our vision was always, like Docker is, like, broad adoption, get tooling, and content out to everyone. So vision was always, we need to make this accessible to everyone. And then, for enterprises, we provide things that are scared about compliance, and we can cover what is in the enterprise package.

But for everyone out there, they should get a great starting point and a secure starting point. So that was the vision, always, we should build up to that. So that's what we got to last year and launch that out there. So this is a, a pay product for a bit there, and this is a big deal because you're letting revenue go by making this choice.

Yes, I know. So it was a paid product. What we did is basically launch a large catalog of, we've made our entire content entire catalog available for free, nearly most of it. What's paid is stuff that enterprises would care about still.

So what's free is like any developer, any project that comes, open source projects have been adopted on this scale. In fact, like any day and it's probably the largest of source projects that's moved to this, right? So you want to have a secure starting point. But now if you want an SLA, like any place where there's a CSO, they want things, I want an SLA commitment behind the patching.

I want FIPs images and Sticks images. I want support and patching on images that are all like outside LTS images. That kind of stuff is an update product. I want deeper, more scalable customizations.

Those are not paid products. We still have a paid tier. And that's basically it's a CSO who gets a bunch of stuff, that stuff's in the paid tier. Feature is for every developer, every company up there.

Yeah, sure. So table stakes, it seems as S-bombs, SLS, I didn't know there's an SLS out there, but there is an SLS, a SLS, a build level provenance and cryptographic sign, you're making those three things. Those things will face. Everyone gets an S-bomb, our build pipeline is Salsa.

Salsa. That's how you say it's Salsa. Salsa. That's how you say it's Salsa.

There you go. I'm not going to trip over my acronym ability then and just do Salsa. And so that is how we build these. So we have a Salsa L3 build pipeline.

We actually have an open source, our builder for this. What's been interesting is to do this, we had to change how we build images. I'm still using Docker build, I don't need the covers, but we go away from Docker files to our own semantic layer to our new which builds as well and explain that. And then our build system.

Interesting as we've done this, you know, supply chain security is a broad topic and secure content is one part of that. Securing a build system is another part of that. That's key. It's interesting we've done this and lots of companies interested in our build pipeline.

So that's the next thing we're looking at is exposing that as technology to everyone. So everyone can have secure build pipelines and we'll keep going down to the sort of like how to make a series of supply chain is just critical. Not just a traditional container stuff, but you know, we'll also see this with AI where we talk about that. You said you moved away from Docker file, is that right?

Completely. I mean, it's still using the same technology only the covers, but just we have it. We built our own, we built our own YAML syntax here just to make builds more repeatable. Like in Docker files, you can shell out, you can do stuff, remove that.

So in the syntax, it's very repeatable, it's reproducible. So you can actually do this in a way where you meet salsa requirements. It's still built underneath the covers. Can you unpack briefly?

As bomb, what that means, why it's important and salsa, which is obviously how you say it. I don't know. Right. Yes.

I mean, that's the whole time. Did you know the word time Jared? No, I did not. I know idea.

I also don't know the first time. It was good to know. This is a different version of an SLS point. Let's learn on the air here, which I've been doing it for years.

So we're not even embarrassed. Go ahead. Let us know what it means now. Simply, software materials, all it means is, typically a container package isn't built in many layers.

How do you know what's in it? And then second, you want to know not just what's in it, but how is it built? Everything about how everything was built and signed. If you look at it, it can say like, okay, here's not just a top layer image set and all the packages.

Here's everything else that's in it. And we also sign it. We can capture aspects of the build environment where it was built, various aspects of the node, etc. So there's a bunch of detail that's there.

That's typically important for, or that's important for one provenance, you know where the thing came from. Two later, this is a compromise. You can trace what's not impacted and you can manage that. So S-bombs are critical and then it continues to complicate it just because of all the layering that can happen.

And so we manage all the transliter dependencies. And then many tools, you know, all the scanners can pull from that and understand what's happening there. There's three things to explain here. So S-bombs, the salsa, and the Vex, I'll cover Vex, then second, Vex, then I'm going to get what it stands for wrong.

I'm going to make it up and assume it's correct. Something that can correct me in the comments if I'm wrong, but it's like vulnerability exceptions, I think, which are a lot of times you have CVs that are reported, but if you look through it, the maintainers, you're like, these don't actually apply. And so you can produce Vex statements and that there's also, you know, we stand behind that or the upstream maintainer has it behind it. And then scanners can understand that and they're like, okay, these things don't matter.

So it reduces scanner noise. And what's good to do it this way, a lot of times what other people can do is like, in the S-bomb, they might obfuscate or they have a CV for the CVs, instead we say here's everything, couple different anywhere else, and then we'll tell you which things we think don't matter and we're standing behind that. It's just much more open and transparent. And then salsa stands for, it's an open standard, it stands for how you build a thing and you build an environment.

And then there's various levels in salsa. Three just means it's reproducible, chromatic. It is not being tampered with the build environment itself, it doesn't have access. It's a way to secure your build pipeline that we're standing behind.

So you know, like, okay, nothing can tampered with all the build pipeline itself. And so that's all a bunch of, just maybe, that's like, you know, to give an example, all the machine that goes into doing this stuff. So stuff are pretty in the free, you know, what you said we're giving revenue. I think of it as actually, no, look, our business model is very much, there's both the business model and ethos here.

Ethos is very much, get this out, the commission run over standards, and business model is sure we drive, let's stop a funnel to a paid product. But as we do put a lot of effort and value that we give out, do free, right, Docker Hub is free, and we're giving the free tier for Docker languages. There's lots to just listen to that. Let's just say I'm a working developer with a couple of servers out there in the wild and they're all Docker eyes to maybe I got a Postgres server.

And my base image is like Debian or Alpine or something basic and then I have to get installed Postgres and I, you know, my Docker file does all the things or whatever. What do I gain by switching to a Docker harden image and what do I potentially lose? Or what might I hit up against when I try to do that? Yeah.

So into what you gain. There's two ways with 22 flavors of hard images, like a development image and a production image. In production, in development, you want stuff like you need a package manager, you need shell, you need debug, you need all these things, right, you need to use debug. Cool.

We'll give that to you still minimal. Really with them, we recommend a multi-stage build. So for your production images, you don't need that stuff necessarily. So minimize that.

There are trade-offs here, primarily to do with usability and how you manage that. So first, the images you get from us, maybe you need a few more packages, we've got some ways to build for that. You want that for a build pipeline, we'll add those in, those are still hardened packages we're putting in and you still get all S-bomb, Salsa, all that carries forward. But if you've just built a project and doing it, a lot of times, a lot of people, migrations are really easy.

Sometimes you've done stuff where like, okay, I have to figure out what's my trade-off between usability and security here and what am I managing there? And if I've put my system in a way where it comes to the subwell, or it really depends on shell access in production, then those are trade-offs I'm making. And those are typically the challenges that a number of projects can run into. But also for the most part, from a lot of our customers, we hear the vast majority of their projects are able to migrate easily to this.

We are also looking at building like an agent here to help do this. We've got initial versions of running. We use it into only, and then we start to build it up to how much we help people with complex migrations here. Yeah, that'd be super useful.

So what did an option look like back in May, and then what's it look like since then? Is this something that everyone's just like, it's a no-brainer, obviously you might have some headaches, but they're worth it, or people more tentative, what's been the reception? Yeah, maybe just as an agent first, we did have a webinar, I want to say a couple weeks ago, something I forget when. Does everybody attended?

I think my favorite question from that was, is there any reason I shouldn't use Docker images? It really is like, no one... There's really no reason why you wouldn't want to just have a hearted image, you know? There's a lot of reasons for opening this up, you should go do this.

So early on, we had lots of good traction with the customers and working on them price deals. Since we've open-sourced this, also if we open-sourced it right before the break, I think it's some 16 to something, or they've not open-sourced with the feature, that's when our launch was. But even then, we saw immediate interest and pick up and so we're tracking open-sourced packages, adopting this dramatically, like a mission, and it's gone to it. And then with the customers, it's resonated.

So like, CISO has a platform like it, in part because we've seen player, we hope, which is, okay, now someone on the team, typically someone has a mandate of like, oh, I should go, and people care with this problem. But the barrier for them to go adopt and try it and see the benefit is low, it's basically zero. They can just do it. And then they're like, okay, now I want all these, you know, additional security guarantees are just like, great, now we can have a conversation about the paid tier.

So we've seen an uptake for sure in this motion, playing out where like, open-sourced adoption and double funnel with companies, and then we start working through this. You know, this is still one of the things that people have to take time to work through because like, people have adopted their security, they drive it, but it's time to see this grow quite a bit. You mentioned releasing this announcement, or have it before the break. I don't know.

Didn't you have some feedback on that time? I know this announcement. I think it was like, I think anybody would have feedback on that time. Can we come on now?

Yes, the worst time ever. So I'll say thank you. I'll say thank you. I'll say thank you.

It's the worst time you ever. Just go there for the break. I don't know. I feel like holidays, actually now like when all the airports get released, it's like the moment to restart the things anyway.

Right? Everyone's at home tinkering. They're like, we gotta get our product out there for people to tinker it with it. Yeah, I didn't know it was December.

That's for sure. Yeah, I was like, I don't care what month it is. I'm here. I suppose there's no really bad time.

It's just that whenever you want to get good fanfare, now you're playing a month long launch plan versus a single day with a great precipice and a lot of attraction. No, it's just, I think you just made it harder yourself, basically. Yeah, if it's fair enough, we did that. I don't see but it was just like, let's just do it and get it out with us.

Come back and let's just go. Right. That being said though, I mean, there's no good time like secure today. You know, like security, I would rather use secure today than tomorrow.

Yeah. In every case, because don't delay security. I think, you know, just timing is not the best because we couldn't do the show in December. We were watching our breaks.

We were talking about it now, but here we are December, January 28th, talking about it. Super important. I mean, I think, you know, the one thing that I'm reading here is obviously that, you know, when you make a change, when Docker makes a change, when you change the default, it's a ripple effect about the industry. Yes.

And I think about one, the effect of that ripple and then two, creating that ripple. My gosh, behind the scenes, what kind of thinking, what kind of specifications, kind of planning, how do you architect this new vision, this new build pipeline from build kit to all the, all the free artifacts that are given away for free and then re changing how you productize it to create revenue as a company. I mean, it must have been head of engineering undertaking. You know what I mean?

It's a whole company effort. Also, my job is easiest in all of this. I mostly say, hey, we should do this. We should do this.

Let me know when it's finished, guys. And then, you know, look, Docker's got a great talent and so rally and stuff. In this case, like, this is always part of the thing we wanted to go do and drive it. But then, yes, there's lots of stuff to go figure out.

Studyful is foremost with, don't put stuff out there. Like, it's true for everything. But if you're going to make a big product announcement that we have, like, the quality, the underpinnings of this technical security have to be discovered. We simply cannot do it if you don't do that.

In part, because, you know, not from a brand damage on call, it's not like that, too. But first, we are the source of supply chain. Like, people will take what we put out there. And, yes, we'll get, you know, if you do something bad, some find out, we'll figure out.

But, like, really, it's like a responsibility of, like, whatever we're doing is going out there. So we have to deeply, deeply care about that. And so that comes from, like, just the team that's on this and the experts we have on this and, like, going deep here, right? We've got, like, decades in these areas.

And they've got a bunch of strong people here, working on it. And then there is a product and strategy and all that we work through, like, okay, how to actually get this out. My security, managed customers through this, and worked through all of that. So, yeah, this is definitely a whole company effort for us to go.

And it's the start of what we're doing. This is just the start, right? Like, the vision is security and type supply chain. For those drivers, like, you know, void main down.

Like, we want to address everything. We make it to packages, get you build pipeline, secure the entire supply chain as we can. We can get policies out, because we set everywhere in SDLC, from laptop to CI, production, to registries, content, rest. Let's try to get to where we can secure all of it.

Well, friends, I don't know about you, but something bothers me about getting back. I love the fact that it's there. I love the fact that it's so ubiquitous. I love the fact that agents that do my coding for me believe that my CI CD workflow begins with drafting tom will files for getting back.

That's great. It's all great. Yes. Until your builds start moving like molasses.

Getting back is slow. It's just the way it is. That's how it works. I'm sorry, but I'm not sorry because our friends at namespace, they fix that.

Yes. It's like the best part is name space.so to do all of our builds so much faster. namespace is like GitHub Actions but faster and like way faster. It caches everything smartly.

It caches your dependencies, your Docker layers, your build artifacts so your CI can run super fast. You get feedback loops, happy developers because we love our time and you get fewer. I'll be back after this coffee and my build finishes. So that's not cool.

The best part is it's drop in. It works right alongside your existing GitHub actions with almost zero config. It's a one line change. So you can speak your builds, you can like your team and you can finally stop pretending that is focus time.

It's not. Learn more, go to namespace.so, that's namespace.so, just like it sounds. Like it said, go there, check them out. We use them.

We love them. And you should too. Namespace.so. Can you estimate the time to shipping from the point where the phrase Docker harden images was like a white on a whiteboard somewhere or in a product roadmap?

Like we're going to do this someday to deciding we're going to do it now. And then from that point till either December 16th or May when you actually ship the original version. Let's see. I'll try to jump on me.

So I think I'll say is, so when you see a join, I would say fab of last year, that's when the site is rolling around and before seems like, yeah, we're going to do this. We're going to launch it. So I think from that point, people are still set, but from the team, at that point, so I don't know, only fab, but fab, something like that. And we got it out into like a limited release, like early, limited release.

And I want to say three months, we're customers jaded, you know, within the next three months. So that got us to like summer, fish. Then we grew, kept growing, growing, and then I think we knew we wanted to make it. We weren't sure when, but I think the real thing, like, oh, we should work with free December.

I want to say it was like, honestly, it was like, maybe early November was like, okay, we're doing this, or like right on, yeah, we're supposed to think it was whatever we call somewhere on there. And so from then till that was like a probably a four-week sprint. That's all pretty good. That's all pretty impressive.

You said you have a good team there. I mean, that I was expecting longer. So I guess congrats to you and the team for really a pretty quick turnaround. Yeah, well, since day and age, you don't have time.

I don't have time. Yeah, I'm going to get done yesterday. Very good. I don't have time.

I'm going to get it done yesterday. Because also, there's so many talk containers, but like, you know, this A, this mode of working is critical for us for everything we're doing. And, you know, we're going to talk with that, like it's in that space in particular, the time I just said in the air world has to shrink 10x. Yeah.

So this muscle is in general as an Asian organization critical for us. This part of the conversation talks about the time. Eight months is when I roughly kind of captured there to go from Docker harden images to GA to let's make it free, let's release it, but the tension behind it has to go back beyond that. Because one thing that was mentioned in the announcement post was, I'm going to quote this, it says, and while some vendors suppress CVEs and their feet to maintain a green skinner, Docker is always transparent.

So there's this, it seems like if I'm reading this correctly, you got Docker, which is, you know, the supply chain essentially of images, Docker hub and the trust factor. And you got vendors out there who have been doing versions of this, seemingly not being fully transparent, making their builds green when they're actually not green. Can you speak to not just the cycle to get here, but the tension that rose to say, we've got to take this on, we've got to make this a the way, this default stance that you made it. Can you speak to the attention and what it took to sort of own the responsibility?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, these ideas go way back, I can go to when I Google just sort of started, right? And so like, all the ideas go back. And so discussion on what's been the like, what should we do here, what to build, how to manage this?

I think there's been lots of like, in the past discussion of how should we do this? And then there's a big enough business here. Should we go after this? How do we think about this versus what else we're doing across the company, etc.

So, this discussion has definitely been there for some time. And it was the best way to do it. I think few things came together for us in fact. One, we should change clarity of like, we're doing the stuff, we're going to do it.

Second, I see the technical side, like, clear clarity, like how we should do this, like, no, this happens, like, we're going to do this differently. And here's how you completely like, like, next statements are the thing that industries adopting now and we're helping driving that we've broken all the scanners. Like, this is why I should adopt it. It's been, it's a standard, but there's no universal adoption of yet and we're like driving that forward and making that happen.

So the tension is definitely there. But before that, I've been here now, I've seen before my time, it's been there. It's one of those topics that's, you know, been in the industry for a while. And then the real thing was like, no, we should do this.

And that was both business clarity and second, I'd say, technical clarity on how to do this. And then on the speed, we built a bunch of stuff, but we get to leverage a lot of Docker underpinnings, right? We've got the look at here, we've got Docker engineer, we've got hub here, like, we get to leverage all of that for how we can drive this. And we can have it.

Yeah, I think the core part is just realizing this will come from like, we are a, not really, like, we are a core part of supply chain. And so, we have to start not just the kind of stuff we do, but like, take on the broad responsibility of how to secure supply chain, that's both a business opportunity, but it's also almost like a responsibility, right? Given our position with your, can you go deeper into this VEX? You've said a couple times vulnerability, exploitability, exchange, it seems like I'm not steep deep in this, I'm learning, and that's, that's, I'm pulling back the Google results on the stuff.

Yes, that's the Google here and there, because it's just easier sometimes. It seems like this is a way to be transparent, you software suppliers to be transparent about particular areas where you're still vulnerable, but you're able to do so it seems like in a community mindset where, hey, we've got this thing, we're delivering it, it's not fully green. And these are the areas where it's not green. Can you speak to the behind the scenes of what the exchange actually is?

Yeah, so the way actually that is, can I have packages? So typically, if you're, if you're distro, you have packages, and then you have your own CV fee, like, hey, we will tell you what is the CV is here, and that's what we should control it. You have this, who just you often, of like, well, there are CVs, but like, you know, the CV is in the national database, but they're not actually an exploitable CDE. You know, we don't, we don't, we don't think it's actually exploitable in our, in our code base or the way this works.

So if you publish your own CV fee, you can just publish it, and that's what we do it. We take a different approach where we publish free transplant response. Scanners can take that and they pull the central CV fee and the CDCVs. Then we publish the VEX feed that says, okay, here are the ones that we don't think matter.

And the other approach, you're missing that, that, that transparency and that logic of like, oh, here's everything, here's what we think, don't matter, and here's why. I wish there's a better approach, because then we can talk about it, right? And we can see whether you agree or don't agree with us, if you feel like, also for CISOs on the right, for anyone else, it's very clear what's happening. So that's the sort of thing we're doing, the approach we're taking here.

Now, this is being a standard for some time. It was just like never, as I can tell, like broadly adopted yet, because like, with scans we're working through, somehow at some day, and I'll be working with all of them and they're all getting it in there. And what it seems like is it's a focus on what is exploitable versus the things that are not. So you still have, let's just say, certain concerns, but these are the ones that we should pay attention to.

These are the ones that are actually worth paying attention to, and they actually cause real harm or damage. It's both, we put everything that is, which annotates stuff. So we put everything that I can hear, the ones that we think are coming, but then also explicitly, which ones I'm not exploitable to put that in there too. So we cover all of that in there.

What about this tension? Can you go, can you go maybe one layer deeper in terms of who has been the supplier? So you got Docker, then you got third parties, not so much by name necessarily, but like, what are their roles in the supply chain? And why has this moved to a free tier with these kind of table stakes requirements?

Been a great move compared to the prior, you know, the prior way. Sure. So maybe we think, maybe we'll talk about this as, I think like, you know, Docker Hub has been, I'd say the, easily the biggest main registry for purposes, there have been other companies that have come up that are selling harder content images, right? So that's been a model that other business models that companies have already doing.

So then the question for us was like, well, when is, like, very natural for us to do that? So we should look at doing that. And it's a thing we've discussed and not done explicitly, so it's a very natural thing for us to go do. I think that tension, Docker module, just like, Docker Hub could have remained just the open source, use booty first place, or really it's like, no, Docker should take on supply chain security all up.

And I think that was sort of changing, like, our product and business thinking is like, if you look at our, like, prox, strategy pillars, supply chain security should be a core part of it, because we are a core part of supply chain, not just for images, but also Docker engine is, right? It's once everywhere. And so we should take those two things and drive supply chain security everywhere. And so that was the thing that sort of mental framing change that was needed here, first to go drive with this and go do this.

And now the other thing for us, making this phase with two parts, one, it's a general approach of welcome to adoption, and then drive, use that as a funnel. But maybe second is like, you know, we have a holistic platform and supply chain security and secure content is one part of that. So that's why, for us, maybe there's somewhat of, you know, revenue impact to, but I don't actually think so, because for anyone who needs compliance guarantees, there's a picture from us about adoption. But this is a, this is one pillar from business, not the entire business, right?

So that lets us go do things where we can draw adoption for the community. So it's very much a long term play. Like, this is not a short game play. This is a long gameplay.

And, you know, Jerry, we just were about the release episode. I think it might be, I don't know if it's out or not, I don't know about securing MPM. This reminds me a lot like that. I'm wondering, if while you were in this tension period with the ecosystem and realizing the responsibility, and then in this announcement back in February internally, Hey, let's do Docker harden images.

Let's actually put the effort here. Let's do all the research. Let's figure out what we have to tie together and let's make a concerted plan to execute. How did you look at the rest of the world in developer land to say, where are the supply chain attacks happening and what are their issues?

Because there seems to be a responsibility you've taken on and just put it bluntly, GitHub is not with MPM, at least based on our current examination of the situation, you've taken the responsibility and made a concerted effort and launched in the ones. And you've done it regardless of maybe here in this conversation, regardless of potential revenue loss, I think it's a long term play, and you're adding trust to the layer and security to the layer, which is good for your brand long term and good for Docker. And me, I got a home lab launching Docker is not a daily, you know, I want that to be trusted and secured. How did you look at the rest of the world when it comes to supply chain attacks or supply chain security?

Was MPM one of the examination targets for you? Yeah, so numbers are turned back to absolutely. One thing we before do that, just a revenue topic first, actually think of this is very excellent for us to be great, right? Like actually in this, we're having this conversation because we launched Docker is all listening to it, hopefully, maybe we could use it.

And within companies, they'll want to start the CISO's one and that should really to them calling us. So like the reach, basically our reach should expand here, right? So if you're this is like a really solid for us and we're starting to see the play out, just never in front. On the other part, you're absolutely right.

Look, I can't tell if supply chain security attacks have actually gone up or we just like talk about them more, but there is definitely a marked increase here, right? The MPM stuff, but like the childhoods that just happened, so I know that I love that name, I had just watched the show and then I was like, oh, no, I know. So we absolutely saw that and see this happening broadly. And when you look at that, this is what I was saying, like this is the start.

We have right now with Docker images, we've started securing a critical part of your supply chain. There's a lot more to do. There's a lot more that's in your supply chain, there's packages, there's one time. And so our ambition is to get through all of it and start looking at it all mostly because it's just the tax increasing and supply chain attacks are the ones that have massive impact, right?

They just ripple out. And so what you see is a critical A business need and a need need for like software across the world. And then it's also just critical foundation needed, I think if you're going to live in a world where AI agents are writing more software, like if you don't have secure foundations, that's life system, get way, and so as we look at our AI play, we take secure contents and smash security, it's a critical pillar for that too. So that was absolutely all of these things.

And to be clear, we've not addressed all of them, but this is why this is a, this is not a one and done. We've got a lot of images that's good. No, this is a similar, it's a filler. Now we're going to walk in the pillar.

So one thing we didn't cover was the breadth of the announcement of what was happening here. So if I, if I understand quickly and correct me wrong, my be wrong is over 1,000 hardened images and helmet charts are not available. That's a lot. You're building on Alpine and Debian.

These are familiar. These are trusted foundations we're building on. And it's obviously being announced as open source under the Apache to license. So DHI is not free under Apache too.

That's the, the current state of affairs. Where do we go from here? Like what is in that 1,000 hardened images in those home charts? What is not there currently?

What needs to be there? What is the, if now is the flag moment, you know, where else are you going to go from milestones? Yeah. So a number of things, one, we're going to roll out hardened system packages.

Also today, a lot of system packages that you want come from, we're going to start offering our own hardened system packages, but from source, we'll patch ahead where and when needed. So we started doing that and that's going to, that'll come out. We're also going to look at like language packages, attack that language by language and go into that and get those out. On the enterprise side, we'll look at long-term support typically packages have like, you know, LTS, they're off like two years, you're talking patches from upstream with three years.

We will, you can buy long-term support from us. So we continue patching and to be friend prizes, you know, for various reasons, they move slower. And so that's important there. So we expand the way to think about this is like expand the breadth and coverage of all the things, of all the content you would care about.

Let's get that out. The next thing after that for us, I think, is a secure build pipeline. This is not another thing we're trying to look at, do, to see all the interest here. And so we figure out how exactly we do that.

We want to get this out. So anyone who's building the operas to run on us and get the benefits of starts to build pipeline. And we're getting that out from there. And then I'd say last thing, and this is like, I mean, possibly started as well.

I really wanted to, you know, get some agents out here that help you with either migration or help you with like understanding your state of affairs and get you hard to get them secure. Basically, everything we can do to have the foundation to make it secure and then help you move towards that and manage that. So I'm increasing your hardened images directory catalog, as you do. And I've been looking at a few of these, and it's very cool.

I have some questions around like the security summary. So I'm looking at the PHP image based on the 1392 packages. That's pretty slim. Seven tools included if you run on the PHP image.

And it has one medium severity vulnerability, 10 low severity vulnerabilities, six unspecified severity vulnerabilities. I assume those are upstream vulnerabilities that you know about because you're not doing hard in packages. Like those things are just like you're patched up as far as you can go, but they're just known vulnerabilities. Is that what those mean?

Good question. So the laws and unknowns, my step at the media one, I'm going to look at it afterwards. Typically those will, if there's any high, we'll go ahead and do it. Medium should fall that category too.

I think for us, where I like it should be something we go off to soon. So I'll go get that one afterwards. But generally, high critical, of course, and even mediums, we try to get ahead of and drive quickly. So when you have like say, there's this medium here and we don't know what it is, I can't seem to find if it lists what that is somewhere.

I think that'd be pretty cool. Addition. It should be if it isn't, yeah, it'd be good addition. Yeah, that'd be a sweet addition.

I do see a full security details. And it still shows the vulnerabilities list, but I can't seem to find it at the moment. Anyways, is that then, is that a known CVE against the package or against one of these 92 things that have been installed? Yes.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that there is a patch or is there a patch that just hasn't been applied? If there's a patch, we apply it really fast, like ours, like in the other patch, you know, or in the likely case, yeah, like another patch. But even then, we typically try to go work at it and get a patch in place. That's what we do for high.

So the medium, it depends a lot where we are on that. Yeah, I mean, yeah, lots of packages, yeah, lots of images. It's probably a an ever, an ever-ending task is this to continuously be. Yeah, so this behind this, this machine running, right?

Yeah, totally. Software and people. So then the other question I have about is the scout health score, which maybe it's not as new to me. Is that new in general or just new to me?

It's not to be something we've had for some time. Okay. Sculpt is our own scanner that we've had. And it's own scanner that scans everything.

And now we've just put it in here. So you can see the health score that's there. We've given it, you know, in hub package owners can see the health score for their package that they're publishing. And now here we've done it.

So any of you can see the health score of packages we're publishing here with the DHI. Yeah, that's super cool. So this one has an A score and it has all the reasons like no high, no high profile vulnerabilities, no fixable, critical or high vulnerability signs, supply chain out of stations, knowing that it's secreted, knowing that malware like on and on and on. And I assume there's a score for every image you'll have on here.

There should be a score for every image. And there should not be any score that's lower than an A. And if there is, I would follow up on that. Well, if we have, honestly, if we went through my scout score and just say, show me the ones that are these are lower.

And then, you know, get the word. And you mentioned, actually, I just mentioned one thing there, which was like knowing that was secret, etc. So that's another thing where it's not just back to playing CVs, we go through actually, like, you know, a list of stuff, like what makes it secure. And it's shown as they're like, there's no credentials and they're none of this stuff.

And keep on getting lots of patches from all the time. And we scan every single one of them. So just make sure, yeah, running here and people to make sure what's happening here is secure. It's cool stuff.

I think like a good step forward for everybody. It's honestly, for me, it's been, I'm inside the house. So it's, you know, by some say, but like seeing the team here just running this and defines it and have very strong opinions of how to approach this one. It's been, it's been really fascinating for us to do that, right?

It's coming here and see everyone who walks to the space and do it because a lot of depth in here, as you've done this. So I'm excited now and patient to like do all the stuff, this photo vision in the space and build this out. And I'm hoping with everyone listening, you should go try DHI. It's too easy not to or too easy to, I guess, too easy to and there's enough to do it.

Yeah, too easy to and there's enough to, I like that's a better way to say it. There you go. So this makes me feel like containers are the way even more so now. They've already been the way for so long.

And this has been the Docker story arc since, you know, Solomon to now, essentially, is that it took the world by storm. We now have the containerized way to do things to pulling applications, become used in ever. And you know, if there was any scrutiny on how that plays out, well, now that you've made this security mindset, a first class citizen in the way you deliver, which seems like the obvious way to do things like to not do it this way seems like that's just not right. Yep.

Is containers other way? Would you agree with that? I think containers are the way. I mean, like in general, I don't think containers are going anywhere, even as application paradigms are changing.

End of the day, containers are a great way to bundle up software package as well, understand it to port across systems 1000%. Can you speak to the ecosystem and the partners? So external, Google, Mongo, the CNCF, Sneak, JFrog, a lot of the players in the space, CircleCI, Sockit, even. We have friends at Sockit.

Can you speak to partner level involvement in orchestrating all the things, I guess? Yeah, there's a ton of partner involvement, right? And I've got various kinds. So there's scanners.

So like, Wizz is, for example, we work with them to debate stuff. You're like, all the various scanners, there's a bunch of scanners have to do with us to drive that. There are CSVs where they put images from us and understand that's working with them. It's also interesting things we can do with them over time and figure out various, you know, they have trust centers to have them integrate with us too, right?

So all of their effects will be their own scanners and their own registry caches have them integrated with this. So we do that. Then there are other players in the sort of, I would say, supply chain or security space, right? So Sockit is interesting.

We actually have a partnership with Sockit that I think we announced where you can get images from us and we'll integrate Sockit. And so you can get Sockit firewall and get their benefit over please, bye-bye or I forget which one they're on now at the NPM. And so the number of, like, the ecosystem, like Docker is, in general, that, you know, the DevTools badge interface has lots of plays in it and the Docker is just, like, such a core part of the Nexus. So we have lots of plays to integrate with this.

So when we do this, we have a key answer that goes on and drives very smart. So we have strong relationships with many people here with Microsoft. Actually, that was built. When we said LA, the name was built, I was the name was built last year when you were there too.

That's where we announced it and we had early integration with Microsoft for this, where they were to take Docker images ready for deploy them and keep up with updates and get those deployed to their pipeline into their scanners. And so there's a number of these kinds of features we're doing everywhere. I mean, the way maybe to think about this is, if you want to go drive broad change and impact, us launching is critical, but we have to go do it through all the various, the key sort of, you know, systems and players in the space, like you can't do broad impact without working with partners. What does that like?

Do you have to, if I'm one of these partners, do I get early access to documentation? Do I get early access to maybe an embedded engineer that's, you know, works for Docker, but actually works for me because they're inside my organization, helping me better understand, organize the way we work around securing Docker or working orchestration as a partner. How does that, how does it play out when it's actually boots on the ground, people getting commingled? How does that work?

It varies based on the state of the partner state where we are. So for example, we said early Microsoft on, we were just getting started. So in that case, we had PMs and engineers connected, generally when we're not going to join Slack channel or something, and then we're deeply connected. And in that case, we're doing some cool build and it's very early.

So they're getting early access from us and we're working together. When you're later stage, then you just have to have connection between partnerships and product people generally and then you drive that forward, right? So depending where we are, we do this. But then maybe the approach and the philosophy here very much is succeeding partnership is not the job of like a partnership department.

It's a job of like our company with everyone, right? So we figure out what's needed and drives that. And that's a general push for everything, right? These aren't like, yes, they're departments folks and stuff, but like we have to operate as like one.

And so depending on what's needed, we'll have engineers for Dan, we'll have essays for Dan, whatever's needed to like, manage this and do this as he works with everyone around it. And so it varies a lot to where we are and what's needed as he works with. But like, it's absolutely like it ends up becoming a cross-function team effort, the default. Is there a framework or a specification or a substrate that can be borrowed or extracted from all the work you've done?

Your team has done for the last eight or nine months, accomplished in this mission. I'm just thinking like, if we want MPM or any other registry out there to have similar characteristics or similar concerns around security, is there a substrate here that can be extracted that says this is the way we secure registries across the board? Because when you look down the line, you've got the idea that you've mentioned hardened MCP service, for example, this is everything around the AI. And that's how can we secure AI?

Then you've got things like maybe hardened libraries or system package, something like app, anytime you install anything, like is there an extractable thing here from this effort that you can lead or provide a spec to? That's a good question. So first that comes to my mind is actually, I think the first thing is like, at least extracting the principles and the like, and goals that being very clear about that, we have some core principles that you've applied. And I said that because like, the house might defer depending on the domain of what's needed, right?

For sure. And so then it's like, what can you extract a technical level to that? I am not sure. I'm sure the stuff here, but especially if you think about stuff outside container images land, then it's interesting and like a little different, but the principles definitely do and the approach does in terms of common things that you can pull out there.

I think there are things here, for example, like the way we're building, yes, we made it for images and containers, but I suspect that like, if you sit down and look at it, core parts of that stuff, we can pull out and make it work for like non-container stuff to maybe, right? And I'm bringing it a bit here when I say that. But there's a core parts like how do you do a build on a secure build pipeline that should apply, I think, a little more generally to as an example, there are parts of like some of the AI agents we're running that can apply more broadly than just for, because they run at a core level to verify security, all the thousands of upstream peers will be getting, right? So maybe stuff like that, but first up, I can think like, okay, how do you secure non-container registries, et cetera?

First up, it comes to me very much is like, let's extract the core principles, and then we can see what components are, for example. Yeah. Do you have that in like a manifesto? And if not, can you give it to me?

Yeah, as I was saying this, I'm like, I think I teed up the next question. Yeah, I really want that. I mean, I really do. I think, because I even think about like, I want your what and your why, and I kind of want a little bit of your how, but not all of your how, because my how is going to be a little bit different based on my context, right?

I want to know your what and your why and how you think about the problem, because I want that's the intellect. That's the intellect. That's the intelligence. My how is going to be different if I run, you know, a different kind of registry that is not at all images or contain images or around the things you care about.

It's going to be a way different thing. So don't tell me the how. Give me the what and why. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. That's actually great. And also, you know, riffing a bit here, even though how if you do that you should produce maybe like this, maybe another opportunity, this is good to you, maybe some ideas, maybe another opportunity, what we see and see for someone of like producing spec of like, once you've done it, like, you know, what's an S bomb? And it's a signed artifact saying, Hey, here's what I've done.

Here's what's there that someone can take and understand and then be like, Okay, cool. This passes the bar. So, you know, if you can agree with the what's and how is then cool, someone does do that and produce a result and artifact that captures all of that. And then depending on what you're doing, you can still like have a central, a central like, you know, reviewer or grader or something across stuff.

So it's unlimited to just get done as well, like expand broadly. There's something interesting you can also do this for like runtime security, for example, I think. Cool. I think you gave me, you gave me an action item here.

All right, go right down. What's a podcast? I mean, I want it seriously. So the moment you release it, email me personally, if you don't mind, because I'm going to read it right away.

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You know, we're here in January just till in January going to February. You've done all this work. It's released. It's out there.

We've got table stakes, hard and security out there for Docker images. What is next? You've got great partners in place. You talked about how you integrate with them, how you work with them, how you involve them, and then you have hopes for a new trust to be built on in the community.

What is in your mind as head of engineering, both leading your team but also just all sorts of thinking about Docker and its trust level. What do you want to come from all this work? There's a lot here. So in terms of what's next and like and how to think about the impact they'll be quick to get here.

So first on the customer stuff, like I said, we should do a lot more, right? We've got to keep our packages, expand the ecosystem of stuff we cover a lot more packages, get into language packages, build stuff with enterprise layer. We do need to get a secure policy like the ability to find policy and force it across your entire tool chain. So working on that, getting a secure build to the deeper map here for us to go work on and drive.

But maybe like, you know, to your point, like, what's the sort of maybe the very impact we want here? Like, one, I'd love to see like, I'd love to see this beat default starting point, right? Like, what is needed to get into play when I'm building something new? Why not start with Docker?

What all is needed to achieve that? And I expected to make sure of technical and non-technical things that are needed there. Like one, it's like, you know, for somebody that's starting, like, where did they learn how to start? How do you make this beat default easy path for a lot of people?

It's like, I'll just, I'll copy someone else did, or I'll just do whatever chat chip you tell me to do. So like, how do we go and influence all these places and let's be starting point for everyone? Because that's, that should be a key thing if I jump forward, and you're in the future. Great.

The next popular open source package starts with the data because like, why wouldn't that's the thing you do? Let's have to go achieve that. And the reason that matters to us, apart from, you know, the trusty goal, or just the real goal of like, makes office secure. Like, on the business side, that then literally leads to friend prices, they get to buy enterprise that'll secure you from us.

Yeah, just worry a little less, you know, one, one less worry for a CSO or one less worry for a head of engineering to think, gosh, you know, our supply chain needs to be secured. Somebody should do something about that. And let's just trash the engineers, right? Let's just shift left more, okay?

Just put more on developers. Right. Even more. That's one way to go.

Yeah. Yeah, well, that's very much, you know, just start, start green, start green, like that, start green, stay green. Yeah. There you go.

That is a, you should, you should take like that. You haven't done yet t-shirt that, okay? That's how you create defaults, right? You create a movement.

You see that, kind of a tangent. I don't, I'm gonna riff a little bit. Do you see that? I think it was the show Billions or something like that.

Honestly, I don't even, I didn't watch the show. That's all the clip where he was talking about lemons. Do you see this clip ever? I don't, I see the show.

I don't call this clip. Well, there's a known term out there. You know, when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, he's like, no, no, no, that's not what you do. I'm gonna just paraphrase it because I forget, but he went into this massive, just like deep dive.

Now, you don't make lemonade. You make lemons scarce. And he went to this whole story of how you make lemons the default and you, you make it a tagline. That's, that's not cool.

That's Lamont. You know, you kind of give it this cache of sorts, you know, I think if you do something like that, you create a movement, you create a change. Yeah. That's how you create, you start green, you stay green and you make that the, the maneuver and it's essentially you make it not cool.

That's the ultimate's nurse knife. It's the inevitable. Like this is the way and the longer you take to get there, the further behind you are. Yeah, 1000% agree.

Yeah. And so we could do that. And then also, I don't know, I do mean, go for you to be the thing that like is the default thing that like every agent recommends and starts because that's just how you're going to go down anyway. So yeah, I just recommends is still black box, I guess, away, right?

Yeah. That's just from the side, it's not from the bottom, it's from the bottom up freaking that out. What's left? I know we covered a lot.

I know you have a big role there. I know that there's a lot happening around Docker in general. I mean, this is a big announcement. There's AI things happening.

What is your stance on things in that, in that area, around the Docker world? That's, that's, you know, so we don't know this, but like the AI stuff is clearly a big focus for us. And it sort of comes together in my mind. We will talk a little bit about how we think about it, thinking how I think about this a bit.

So Docker, you know, every user that is a core part of this, you'll see, we help go go from lateral production, and we kind of solve for like, you know, the big growth of apps that happened over the last decade, a lot of data maps, it removes the cloud, everyone built services, continues the way to do that and drive that, we solve all that with our packaging, the content distribution, with the engine from the running. Well, there's two big shifts happening now, right? Everyone is the test is changing. You're developing coding agents, but literally the entire SCLC, how you build, test, publish, run code is going to change and become AI first.