Minimus container images are now free • Hacker News Board

Re: Minimus container images are now free

#21

Post by morellonet » Wed, Jun 24, 2026, 1:31 PM UTC

zufallsheld wrote: post #18

morellonet wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently, yes free as in beer. We build every component directly from source in a SLSA 3 environment we run (mostly in GCP). Making the Dockerfiles available is a fair question, not something we’ve done thus far because it’s not particularly useful if you don’t have all the infrastructure building the components. Do you have particular scenarios you’d like the Dockerfiles for or is it just for transparency/ trust (w…

> Do you have particular scenarios you’d like the Dockerfiles for or is it just for transparency/ trust (which is a totally valid reason of course)? The latter. You or an attacker could tamper with the images - however even with the Dockerfiles I can't be sure that the provided images are built from the Dockerfiles, so in the end I'd have to trust you anyway. Also I'd be curious how you build the images. Thanks for y…

Totally get it… practically if you don’t want to have to deal with constantly updating images you have to have some degree of trust in whomever you get them from… that said, we try to be as transparent as possible with a cryptographically verifiable SBOM for every build of every image, signing every image, providing detailed compliance test results for FIPS, STIG, CIS (see the compliance tab on each image listing)

Your feedback about Dockerfiles is good though and probably something we can easily add to image listings. I opened an issue for us to add.

Note that we also make our package manager freely available in Community Edition as well, which can make the Dockerfile availability more useful.

Re: Minimus container images are now free

#22

Post by morellonet » Wed, Jun 24, 2026, 1:37 PM UTC

cedws wrote: post #20

Since we started paying for Chainguard I’ve become super sold on the benefits of minimal and continually patched images. It’s just a shame that the open source community only gets to benefit from the limited free library DHI and Chainguard offer. I understand it costs money though and that needs to come from somewhere.

This is exactly why we’ve made Community Edition free. The value of hardened, well maintained images to the world writ large is huge.

We believe there is sufficient value to enterprises in the SLAs and broader feature set to build a great business while making the core benefit available to everyone without friction.

Re: Minimus container images are now free

#23

Post by charukiewicz » Wed, Jun 24, 2026, 1:39 PM UTC

Completely blocking the image information page to mobile user agents is completely unnecessary. I'd much rather look at your non optimized page than be told to come back on desktop.

Moreover, even after switching to desktop mode on my phone, there's nothing I see that precludes you from employing a little bit of CSS to make those pages render more nicely on mobile screens.

Re: Minimus container images are now free

#24

Post by morellonet » Wed, Jun 24, 2026, 1:43 PM UTC

charukiewicz wrote: post #23

Completely blocking the image information page to mobile user agents is completely unnecessary. I'd much rather look at your non optimized page than be told to come back on desktop. Moreover, even after switching to desktop mode on my phone, there's nothing I see that precludes you from employing a little bit of CSS to make those pages render more nicely on mobile screens.

Fair complaint. As with all software development we make tradeoffs to try to balance time and capability. I’ll make sure our front end lead see this though :)

Re: Minimus container images are now free

#25

Post by greggsy » Wed, Jun 24, 2026, 1:46 PM UTC

crabique wrote: post #11

Is their ingress-nginx-controller image similar to that of Chainguard: a drop-in replacement with the CVEs fixed?

I see this is a packaging service with greater traceability and velocity than the rando images on docker hub.

I believe that they will always supply the bleeding edge stable release, but it will always be your responsibility to monitor and manage issues like CVEs, rather than expecting them to do it for you.

Re: Minimus container images are now free

#26

Post by pixl97 » Wed, Jun 24, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

morellonet wrote: post #7

hobofan wrote: post #4

Asking the very obvious question (as it's not apparent from the website): Why would I use this over DHI (Docker Hardened Images) or Chainguard Images, both of which also have a set of free hardened images?

1. These are all >1200 of our images, including FIPS, and all versions… others gate many of their images 2. These are all built continuously from upstream source on a distroless base… this makes a significant difference in attack surface and CVE count re DHI images and you can easily check our word with a few scans 3. These are truly free… no auth wall, no signup, no trial, no limit on numbers of images or pulls or a…

>are all built continuously from upstream source

2. Isn't there a slight risk of upstream attacks being amplified by this? With the recent number of software compromises providing a way for people to use images X days old may be useful.

3. This ties into 2, if someone downloads and uses an image that is later found to be compromised they mostly have no way of being notified that happened. Not a huge issue, but is something that should be risk assessed.

Re: Minimus container images are now free

#27

Post by jjice » Wed, Jun 24, 2026, 1:56 PM UTC

charukiewicz wrote: post #23

Completely blocking the image information page to mobile user agents is completely unnecessary. I'd much rather look at your non optimized page than be told to come back on desktop. Moreover, even after switching to desktop mode on my phone, there's nothing I see that precludes you from employing a little bit of CSS to make those pages render more nicely on mobile screens.

Seriously. I get the sibling comment seemingly from someone involved talking about eng resources being tight, but blocking it instead of just showing a desktop page feels absurd.

Re: Minimus container images are now free

#28

Post by tamimio » Wed, Jun 24, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

I have no idea what the heck is this, maybe it’s a great product but a very poor website in telling what I am getting into, is this better than the usual containers? How? Supported platforms? Can I run it on arm? The usuals

Re: Minimus container images are now free

#29

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Wed, Jun 24, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

ramon156 wrote: post #17

morellonet wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. These are all >1200 of our images, including FIPS, and all versions… others gate many of their images 2. These are all built continuously from upstream source on a distroless base… this makes a significant difference in attack surface and CVE count re DHI images and you can easily check our word with a few scans 3. These are truly free… no auth wall, no signup, no trial, no limit on numbers of images or pulls or a…

The question was "why over DHI?" 1 and 2 are not a reason 3. no X, no Y, also not a reason 4. `rg agents`. Right

3 is exactly the reason I've never bothered to try docker's offering; that definitely is a reason

Re: Minimus container images are now free

#30

Post by morellonet » Wed, Jun 24, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #29

ramon156 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question was "why over DHI?" 1 and 2 are not a reason 3. no X, no Y, also not a reason 4. `rg agents`. Right

3 is exactly the reason I've never bothered to try docker's offering; that definitely is a reason

Re 3, one of the features in Enterprise Edition is integrations with Slack, GitHub, webhooks, etc. a key use case is getting a push notification (or even triggering automation) when an image you’re using gets an update.

It’s simple but pretty granular too… ‘if this python image gets a fix for a critical CVE that’s actively exploited, trigger a GitHub action to rebuild the app with the updated image