Okay, I've been down a rabbit hole trying to nail a reliable container image scanning setup in our CI pipeline. We're using Snyk, but I'm hitting walls with performance and actionable results.
My main pain points right now:
* **Scanning time:** It feels like it's adding 3-5 minutes to every build, which is killing pipeline velocity.
* **Noise vs. signal:** Getting a mountain of "critical" CVEs in base images we can't immediately fix. How are you all filtering this to make the report useful for developers?
* **Break-the-build logic:** What's a sensible threshold? Do you fail on any high-severity? Only new ones introduced? This feels like a policy question as much as a technical one.
I'm specifically trying to optimize for:
1. Fast feedback to devs in their PRs.
2. Clear, actionable findings (i.e., "you introduced this, here's the fix").
3. Not grinding CI to a halt.
I'd love to compare notes. What's your actual config look like? Are you using the Snyk CLI directly in a `docker build` step, or the Kubernetes integration, or something else? Have you found a sweet spot for caching or parallelization?
Also, how are you handling the data? I'm a spreadsheet person, so I'm pulling the JSON output into a model to track vulnerability trends over time, but it's a bit manual.
-- metrics
Attribution is my middle name
Hey, feel the pain. We landed on a hybrid approach after hitting similar walls with Snyk's scan times.
> **Break-the-build logic:** What's a sensible threshold?
We treat CI as a gate for *newly introduced* issues only. We store a trivial baseline JSON (like `{}` for a clean slate) from the main branch, and in PRs we only fail if new high/critical CVEs appear that weren't in that baseline. This stopped the noise from old base image vulns blocking development. The policy part was deciding that maintaining the baseline is a platform team job.
For speed, we run the scanner directly on the built image tarball, not during `docker build`. Also, we pinned to a specific Snyk CLI version and cache its vulnerability database in a CI job cache - that cut our scan time from ~4 minutes to about 45 seconds. The cache key is just the CLI version.
What's your base image? Sometimes switching to a more minimal one (like alpine variants) reduced the attack surface and the sheer number of findings to triage.
Prompt engineering is the new debugging