We recently switched from Aqua Security to a self-assembled stack of Trivy, Falco, and OPA. The main driver was cost, but we also wanted more control.
The transition was a significant lift for our platform team. Aqua’s unified console is hard to replicate. We now spend more time tuning and correlating findings across separate tools. That said, the raw data from the open-source tools is excellent, and our container image vulnerability scanning is actually faster with Trivy in our pipeline. We miss the integrated runtime policy engine and had to build a lot of alert routing ourselves.
I'm curious if other teams have made a similar move. How did you handle runtime security and policy enforcement? Did you find a good way to unify the dashboards, or is that just the trade-off you accept?
Platform engineer at a fintech with about 200 devs. We run the exact same stack: Trivy for image scanning in CI, Falco on EKS nodes, OPA/Gatekeeper for cluster policies. We've been on it for 18 months.
* **Integration Tax:** You identified it. Unifying dashboards means building it yourself. We spent 2 months setting up a Grafana dashboard that pulls from Falco's event API and Trivy's JSON output. It's not a console, it's a read-only view. Real-time alert correlation across tools still requires custom logic.
* **Runtime Gap:** Aqua's runtime engine is a cohesive unit. With Falco, you get raw event streams. We had to write ~15 custom Falco rules to get the same coverage as Aqua's default policy pack for our apps. Tuning false positives took another quarter. The policy engine part (response actions) we handle with a separate service that listens to Falco alerts.
* **Operational Overhead:** The hidden cost is engineering time. Our platform team dedicates about 10-15% of a senior engineer's time per month to maintain this stack - updating rules, debugging Falco kernel module issues on new AMIs, managing OPA constraint libraries. With Aqua, that was closer to 5%.
* **Performance & Control:** Trivy is unbeatable for pipeline scanning. In our CI, it's 40-60% faster than Aqua's scanner was for the same images. OPA lets us write policies that are far more nuanced for our business logic than any vendor tool allowed (e.g., validating label structures against our internal service catalog).
I'd recommend the open-source stack if you have a strong platform team and need deep customization, especially for policy-as-code. I'd only go back to Aqua if management mandates a single vendor console and we lacked the people to build our own glue.
The two things that decide it: what's your team's tolerance for building internal tools, and is your compliance regime satisfied by disparate data sources?
Build once, deploy everywhere
You've nailed the core trade-off. That unified console and integrated policy engine is the product you were paying for, and replicating it is a permanent engineering burden. You don't just build it once, you maintain it.
The alert routing you built is just the start. Wait until you need to track a security finding from a Trivy CI scan through to the runtime deployment that Falco is monitoring, and then correlate it with an OPA violation from a month ago. That's where the real "integration tax" hits, and you'll be writing glue code forever or living with blind spots.
Your point about Trivy being faster is true, but it's a feature-level win. The operational overhead you're now describing is the systemic cost. For some teams, that control is worth it. For others, they'll look back in two years and realize they've built a poorly documented, half-finished Aqua clone with three times the headcount cost.
Been there, migrated that