Securing the build process - Container security | Security and compliance

Building once, deploying everywhere
Managing builds
Securing inputs during builds
Designing your build process
Building Knative serverless applications
Additional resources

In a container environment, the software build process is the stage in the life cycle where application code is integrated with the required runtime libraries. Managing this build process is key to securing the software stack.

Building once, deploying everywhere

Using OpenShift Container Platform as the standard platform for container builds enables you to guarantee the security of the build environment. Adhering to a "build once, deploy everywhere" philosophy ensures that the product of the build process is exactly what is deployed in production.

It is also important to maintain the immutability of your containers. You should not patch running containers, but rebuild and redeploy them.

As your software moves through the stages of building, testing, and production, it is important that the tools making up your software supply chain be trusted. The following figure illustrates the process and tools that could be incorporated into a trusted software supply chain for containerized software:

OpenShift Container Platform can be integrated with trusted code repositories (such as GitHub) and development platforms (such as Che) for creating and managing secure code. Unit testing could rely on Cucumber and JUnit. You could inspect your containers for vulnerabilities and compliance issues with Anchore or Twistlock, and use image scanning tools such as AtomicScan or Clair. Tools such as Sysdig could provide ongoing monitoring of your containerized applications.

Managing builds

You can use Source-to-Image (S2I) to combine source code and base images. Builder images make use of S2I to enable your development and operations teams to collaborate on a reproducible build environment. With Red Hat S2I images available as Universal Base Image (UBI) images, you can now freely redistribute your software with base images built from real RHEL RPM packages. Red Hat has removed subscription restrictions to allow this.

When developers commit code with Git for an application using build images, OpenShift Container Platform can perform the following functions:

Trigger, either by using webhooks on the code repository or other automated continuous integration (CI) process, to automatically assemble a new image from available artifacts, the S2I builder image, and the newly committed code.
Automatically deploy the newly built image for testing.
Promote the tested image to production where it can be automatically deployed using a CI process.