Hello everyone. I've been conducting a post-implementation review for a client using Lacework, and we've encountered a significant and frankly concerning pattern that I wanted to bring to the community for validation and collective insight.
The core issue is a dramatic, non-linear increase in their monthly cloud service bill (specifically AWS) directly correlating to the full activation of Lacework's container vulnerability scanning features. Prior to enabling the container agent and registry scanning, their Lacework-related cloud costs were predictable and aligned with the data ingestion model for cloud activity logs. However, after enabling comprehensive scanning on their ECR registries and production ECS/EKS workloads, the auxiliary AWS costs—primarily from API calls, data processing, and increased log data egress—have multiplied.
From my analysis framework, this appears to be a classic case of a "secondary cost cascade" often seen in SaaS tooling that leverages native cloud APIs extensively. The vendor's pricing is one thing, but the operational costs imposed on the underlying platform can be a hidden multiplier.
**Key cost drivers we've identified include:**
* **ECR API Call Volume:** Every image scan triggers a `BatchGetImage` API call. For high-velocity development pipelines with frequent image pushes and multiple tags, this generates a massive volume of API requests, which are not free.
* **Data Egress & Processing:** Pulling image layers from ECR to the scanning engine (even within AWS) incurs data transfer costs. For large images or large quantities of images, this becomes non-trivial.
* **Increased CloudTrail & Log Data:** The activity of the Lacework agents and the scanning operations themselves generate additional meta-logging, increasing the volume of data ingested into CloudTrail and other monitoring services, which then also gets ingested into Lacework for analysis, creating a cyclical cost effect.
My procurement playbook always includes a "total cost of operation" (TCO) assessment phase for security tools, but this scenario has been particularly acute. We are now revisiting our scanning policies—like scan frequency, whether to scan on every push or on a schedule, and whether to scan all tags or only specific ones—to throttle back the side effects.
My questions to the community are:
* Has anyone else performed a detailed cloud cost attribution exercise post-Lacework container scanning enablement and observed similar trends?
* What policy adjustments or architectural workarounds have you found effective in mitigating these ancillary costs without completely compromising security coverage?
* In your vendor evaluations, did you find competing platforms that architect their scanning in a way that minimizes these secondary cloud costs, or is this an industry-wide challenge with agent-based, API-heavy scanning?
I believe sharing these operational and financial observations is just as crucial as discussing feature sets. It helps us all build better evaluation frameworks for the next cycle.
null
Yeah, the "secondary cost cascade" is the perfect term for it. Everyone obsesses over the vendor's per-agent or per-scan fee, but the cloud provider's meter is still running in the background. I'd be very curious to see what percentage of the new bill is from ECR DescribeImageScanFindings API calls alone.
This is exactly the kind of architectural tax that never shows up on a vendor's shiny datasheet. They'll sell you on "shift-left security," but conveniently forget to mention you're shifting-left a massive AWS bill too. Did your client's account team offer any useful guidance, or just more hand-waving about "the value of security"?
cg
You're right to zero in on the API calls. That's often the hidden multiplier. In a past review, we saw nearly 70% of the new auxiliary costs were from exactly those ECR API operations, because the scanning frequency and the number of images created a perfect storm of calls.
The vendor's account team rarely has visibility into this, and their guidance is typically limited to their own pricing levers. The real conversation needs to shift to architectural efficiency: can scanning be better batch-aligned with actual registry activity, or tied to promotion events rather than on every build? It's a platform design question, not just a security one.
Stay curious, stay critical.