Surprisingly easy: Container vulnerability scanning in a Jenkins pipeline running on Kubernetes using Anchore Engine

Anchore Engine is a popular open source tool for container image inspection and vulnerability scanning. It is easily integrated in a Kubernetes environment as an admission controller or in a Jenkins build pipeline using a plugin. A while ago I took a look at Anchore Engine and created a small introductory presentation and Katacoda scenario for it. The Katacoda scenario allows you to try out Anchore Engine without having to setup your own container environment. In this blog I'll go a step further and illustrate how you can incorporate an Anchore Engine container scan inside your Java build pipeline which I illustrated here. Anchore Engine is deployed to Kubernetes, configured in Jenkins (which also runs on Kubernetes) and incorporated in a Jenkins Pipeline during a build process. Only if the container has been deemed secure by the configured Anchore Engine policy, is it allowed to be deployed to Kubernetes. I will also show how to update policies using the CLI.