Just spent the last three weeks trying to get Aqua's CSPM and image scanning suite rolled out across our EKS clusters and into our pipelines. After the sales demo made it look like a 2-hour job, I'm staring at a mountain of custom config and integration headaches.
The core engine works, but the "easy deployment" they sold us on assumed:
* Their SaaS connector would seamlessly authenticate with our existing cloud infra (it didn't).
* The Helm chart would be production-ready out of the box. Instead, we're wrestling with resource limits, persistent volume claims, and a dozen values.yaml overrides just to get the basic components stable.
* The pipeline integration would be "drop-in." Here's what we actually had to add to our GitLab CI to make the image scan step work without failing on network timeouts:
```yaml
aqua_scan:
stage: test
image: docker:latest
services:
- docker:dind
script:
- docker pull ${IMAGE_NAME}:${CI_COMMIT_SHA}
- |
docker run --rm
-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
--network host
aquasec/scanner-cli:latest
scan
--host http://aqua-server.local
--user $AQUA_USER
--password $AQUA_PASSWORD
--local ${IMAGE_NAME}:${CI_COMMIT_SHA}
--registry-check false
--htmlfile report.html
artifacts:
paths:
- report.html
when: always
```
And that's just the happy path. We're still dealing with:
* Scanner agent timeouts under load, requiring queue management they didn't document.
* Cost surprises from the "unlimited" nodes promise, which turned out to be unlimited *scanned* nodes, not scanning *agents*.
* Alert fatigue from default policies that flag every base image vuln, requiring us to build a custom policy set from scratch.
Did anyone else go through this, or did we get a particularly bad handoff from sales to engineering? Looking for real-world tuning tips, not more marketing slides.
-shift
shift left or go home