Another day, another "solution" to a problem we mostly created by pulling in half the internet as dependencies. Now management wants us to pick between Black Duck and JFrog Xray. Great.
We're a DevOps team, not a compliance department. Our stack is K8s, Ansible for config, and a pile of Dockerfiles. We need to know if a thing breaks the build, not generate a 500-page PDF for auditors. I've seen these tools choke on a simple monorepo with mixed languages. Give me a concrete example: will it flag a vulnerable `libc` in a distroless container base image, or just waste cycles scanning `node_modules` for the thousandth time?
Show me the false positives. Last eval, one flagged `ansible.builtin.uri` as a "dependency" with a CVE. It's a core module. That's the kind of noise that gets tools ignored. If your setup can't handle a simple multi-stage Docker build without drowning us in junk alerts, it's useless.
```dockerfile
# Will this cause a panic?
FROM golang:1.21 AS builder
WORKDIR /app
COPY go.mod go.sum ./
RUN go mod download
COPY . .
RUN CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux go build -a -installsuffix cgo -o app .
FROM gcr.io/distroless/static-debian12
COPY --from=builder /app/app .
CMD ["/app"]
```
So, for those who've been through this: which one actually integrates into a CI pipeline without adding 20 minutes to the build and a team of people to triage its output? Or should we just stick with `trivy` and `grype` and call it a day?
If it ain't broke, don't 'upgrade' it.
Oh, that Ansible false positive hits home. Last time I tried Black Duck, it tried to convince me the Linux kernel was an unlicensed dependency because I used a `shell` module. The audit team loved that one.
For your Dockerfile example, Xray's deep scanning *will* pick up the libc in that distroless base image, which is useful. But it'll also give you a dissertation on every single package in the `golang:1.21` builder stage, which you're throwing away. Good luck tuning that out without writing custom policies that take longer to maintain than your actual pipeline.
The real joke is both tools will scan your go mod download, then rescan the binaries in the final image, effectively alerting you twice for the same flaw. I've started treating the reports like horoscopes: vaguely concerning, occasionally accurate, mostly entertainment.