Container certification tooling is ready for takeoff

Our new container certification process is now GA for partners to test, certify and publish container images to our Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog. Partners can now verify the functionality and security of their containerized software products with our enhanced container certification tooling.

Meet “preflight”

Our new container certification tooling, called “*preflight”, is here and ready for production use. We wanted to create a way for you to integrate the certification tests in your CI/CD (continuous integration, delivery, and deployment) workflows. To facilitate this integration, preflight allows you to test your containers in your own environment, and gives you greater visibility and control of the certification pipeline and tests. 

Architecture-specific binaries are provided here that partners can download and run locally against containers in the terminal. When you run the necessary preflight commands, you will see log output and PASS/FAIL results in real time. We will scan all RPMs in all layers of your container for known security vulnerabilities, as defined in this article, within the Partner Connect certification project before the certification is completed.

To improve partner experience, this new tool is replacing our legacy certification scanning system which will no longer be available as of April 25, 2022. For more information about what is going away and why, please see our previous blog.

Prerequisites for running preflight

• A container image, built and uploaded to a registry of your choice (e.g. Quay.io)
  • See Red Hat’s container image requirements here
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment with Podman 
  • Get RHEL here
• An account and container image certification project in the Partner Connect online portal

See the full list of requirements and instructions in our official certification documentation.

Get started

Navigate to the certification instructions, and start testing and certifying your containers! If you are currently certified using the legacy tool, you do not need to recertify or modify your certification projects. You will only need to utilize the new process when certifying for your next update.

As always, if you have any comments or questions, please contact our Technical Partner Success Desk and let us know how we can assist. 

Note: *The preflight certification tool is open source and we welcome contributions and feedback within the GitHub repository.