envoy-sidecar-helper

packaged by Chainguard

Chainguard Container for envoy-sidecar-helper

Helpers for envoy sidecars

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/envoy-sidecar-helper: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 envoy-sidecar-helper image is a minimal, Wolfi-based container image for envoy-sidecar-helper, a Go sidecar that waits for an Envoy proxy to become ready and asks it to shut down (via the Envoy admin /quitquitquit endpoint) once the pod's application containers exit, so Kubernetes Jobs can complete. It is comparable to the upstream image: the binary is available at /app/envoy-sidecar-helper (the upstream entrypoint path), and the image runs as the nonroot user app (UID/GID 30001), matching upstream.

The image is built from upstream v0.0.6 and is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

Getting Started

The helper runs as a sidecar container next to your application and Envoy. It reads its own pod through the Kubernetes API, so it needs the POD_NAME and POD_NAMESPACE environment variables and a service account allowed to get pods in the namespace:

  - name: helper
    image: cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/envoy-sidecar-helper:latest
    args:
    - -envoy.ready.check=true
    - -envoy.endpoint.ready=/ready
    - -envoy.port=9901
    - -envoy.ready.port=9901
    - -container=app
    env:
    - name: POD_NAME
      valueFrom:
        fieldRef:
          fieldPath: metadata.name
    - name: POD_NAMESPACE
      valueFrom:
        fieldRef:
          fieldPath: metadata.namespace
    volumeMounts:
    - name: helper-shared
      mountPath: /envoy-sidecar-helper

-envoy.ready.port defaults to 15021 (the Istio health port), so set it to the Envoy admin port when you run plain Envoy. When the readiness check is enabled, the helper writes an envoy.ready marker file under /envoy-sidecar-helper. Mount a shared volume (for example an emptyDir) there; it must be writable by UID 30001.

The upstream Helm chart does not deploy the helper itself. It only creates the envoy-sidecar-helper service account, role, and role binding the sidecar needs. Install it into the namespace where your workload runs:

helm repo add envoy-sidecar-helper https://maksim-paskal.github.io/envoy-sidecar-helper
helm install envoy-sidecar-helper envoy-sidecar-helper/envoy-sidecar-helper --namespace <your-namespace>

Then set serviceAccountName: envoy-sidecar-helper in the spec of the pod that runs the sidecar shown above.

Run the binary with -help to list all available flags.

Documentation and Resources

• envoy-sidecar-helper GitHub project
• Envoy administration interface

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.