Run any vulnerability scanner against a standard python, node or nginx image from Docker Hub and you'll get hundreds of CVE findings — almost none of which your team wrote, and all of which your customers' security teams will ask about. For India's SaaS exporters and DevOps teams, this has become a deal-blocking problem: enterprise buyers in the US and Europe now demand clean vulnerability reports and SBOMs before signing.

The base-image problem, quantified

Chainguard's own comparison tool shows that replacing just five common base images — Go, Node, Python, Ruby and Rust — with hardened equivalents eliminates around 2,517 known vulnerabilities, a 99.84% reduction. Across customers, the average CVE reduction is 97.6%, with attack surface cut by ~85% because the images contain no shell, no package manager, and nothing else an intruder can live off.

What makes Chainguard different

  • Rebuilt from source daily in a SLSA L3-compliant factory — not patched occasionally like Alpine/Debian bases
  • Zero known CVEs at ship time, with a remediation SLA — critical CVEs fixed in ~20 hours on average
  • Signed, with SBOMs and provenance — the exact evidence SOC 2, PCI DSS and enterprise security questionnaires ask for
  • 2,479+ projects covered — language runtimes, nginx, databases, the whole Kubernetes/observability stack, CI tools and AI/ML images, plus FIPS variants
  • Free tier on core developer images (Go, Node, Python, Ruby, Rust, nginx, JDK) — you can pilot today at zero cost

Who's switching, and why

SaaS companies switch when a big enterprise deal stalls on a security review — swapping base images turns a quarter of patching into a sprint. Platform/DevOps teams switch when they calculate what maintaining in-house golden images costs (industry estimate: ~1,000 engineering hours per image per year). Kubernetes shops switch for the operational wins: smaller pulls, faster pod starts, and scanner dashboards that finally stay green. Globally, OpenAI, Snowflake, Canva, Snap and Elastic run on Chainguard; the same images are available to a 20-person startup in Bangalore or Pune.

The supply-chain angle Indian teams overlook

Containers are only half the exposure. The npm and PyPI ecosystems have suffered repeated account-hijack and typosquatting attacks, and one poisoned dependency reaches production in your next build. Chainguard Libraries rebuilds Java, Python and JavaScript packages from verified source in the same guarded factory — so public-registry malware never enters your dependency tree.

Getting Chainguard in India

Invitty provides Chainguard across India — local procurement with INR billing and GST invoice, base-image mapping, a measured pilot on 2–3 services, Dockerfile migration help and CI integration, delivered remotely to any city. See our Chainguard page → or take 30 seconds to send us your current base-image list for a before/after CVE projection.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are zero-CVE container images?
They are base images rebuilt from source so that, at the moment they ship, no known vulnerabilities are present. A standard python or node image from a public registry typically carries hundreds of CVE findings inherited from its distribution packages. A zero-CVE image strips the distribution down — no shell, no package manager — and rebuilds the remaining components daily, so a scanner run against it returns a clean report rather than a backlog.
Are zero-CVE images actually free?
Partly. Chainguard publishes a free tier covering core developer images — Go, Node, Python, Ruby, Rust, nginx and JDK — which you can pilot today at no cost. The full catalogue of 2,479+ projects, FIPS variants, Chainguard Libraries and the remediation SLA sit on the commercial tier. Most Indian teams start on the free images to prove the CVE reduction, then license the images their production stack actually needs.
How do we buy Chainguard in India, and how is it billed?
Through an Indian partner, so you are not dealing with a USD card payment and a foreign invoice. Invitty supplies Chainguard across India with INR billing and a GST invoice, which is usually what finance and procurement need before a purchase order can be raised. Pricing depends on which image families and how many you license — send us your current base-image list and we will come back with a scoped quote.
Do these images work with our existing Dockerfiles?
In most cases the change is one line — the FROM statement. The friction comes from images that assume a shell or a package manager at runtime, which hardened images deliberately omit. That is why a migration starts with mapping your current base images to their equivalents and piloting on two or three services rather than switching everything at once.
How long does a migration take?
A pilot on two or three services is typically a sprint, not a quarter. Teams that have been maintaining their own golden images usually move fastest, because they already know which runtime dependencies matter. The slow part is rarely technical — it is getting the CVE before-and-after in front of whoever asked for it.
Will this help us pass enterprise security reviews and SOC 2?
It addresses the specific evidence those reviews ask for: a clean vulnerability report, a signed SBOM, and provenance showing where each component came from. It does not make you SOC 2 compliant on its own — controls, policies and audit still apply — but it removes the single most common blocker in a security questionnaire, which is a scanner report full of inherited CVEs you did not introduce.
Why not just scan and patch the images we already use?
Because the findings regenerate. Patching an upstream base image is a recurring cost — one industry estimate puts maintaining a single in-house golden image at roughly 1,000 engineering hours a year. Rebuilding from source daily moves that work to the image supplier. The question is not whether the CVEs can be fixed, but who spends the engineering time fixing them every month.

Written by Rathish · Director, Invitty Cognitive Solutions — an authorized partner for 65+ technology brands, serving 2000+ clients across South India since 2013. About the team →