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The relentless pace of cloud-native development often forces a difficult trade-off between application velocity and production security. To resolve this conflict, Red Hat has introduced Project Hummingbird, an early access program providing a catalog of minimal, hardened container images for its subscription customers. This initiative is designed to accelerate development cycles while simultaneously strengthening software supply chain security and enabling "zero-CVE" strategies from the outset.
Red Hat introduces Project Hummingbird, a catalog of micro-sized container images.
The images are hardened and built to ship with "zero-CVE" status.
It aims to reduce attack surfaces and speed up cloud-native development.
The catalog includes popular runtimes, databases, and web servers.
Each image comes with a complete software bill of materials (SBOM).
The project is available through a Red Hat subscription with full production support.
IT leaders are constantly balancing the need for rapid innovation with the imperative of managing security risks in complex software components. Project Hummingbird directly addresses this challenge by providing a curated catalog of tested, production-ready container images that are stripped of non-essential components. This includes the latest languages and runtimes like .Net, Go, Java, and Node.js, critical developer databases such as MariaDB and PostgreSQL, and web servers like Nginx. By offering these lean, pre-hardened images, the project reduces the time developers spend on integration and vulnerability management, freeing them to focus on creating differentiated applications.
A core tenet of Project Hummingbird is delivering images that are shipped free of known vulnerabilities, achieving a "zero-CVE" status upon release. Each image undergoes functionality testing to ensure it is not only secure but also stable and useful in production environments. To further bolster software supply chain confidence, every image is accompanied by a complete Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), providing transparency and helping organizations meet modern compliance requirements. This approach provides developers with a trusted, minimal foundation, significantly reducing the attack surface of their applications.
Project Hummingbird is built with the same enterprise rigor that defines Red Hat's offerings. It originates from Fedora Linux components, the upstream source for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and is built using Red Hat's trusted build system. For subscription customers, the generally available release will include full production support, providing access to Red Hat's hardened software supply chain and deep enterprise expertise. Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, at Red Hat, stated, "The speed of business today depends on the speed of software. As supply chain attacks grow in prominence, organizations are often forced to choose between moving fast and maintaining security posture. Project Hummingbird is designed to remove that trade-off by providing a minimal, trusted, and transparent zero-CVE foundation for building cloud-native applications. This limits vulnerabilities so development and IT security teams have a clear, direct path to business value with speed, agility, security, and peace of mind."
Project Hummingbird represents a significant step towards simplifying secure software development. By providing a trusted source of minimal, hardened container images, Red Hat empowers organizations to innovate faster without compromising their security posture, effectively removing the traditional trade-off between speed and risk mitigation.
About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud technology leader, delivering a trusted, consistent and comprehensive foundation for transformative IT innovation and AI applications. Its portfolio of cloud, developer, AI, Linux, automation and application platform technologies enables any application, anywhere—from the datacenter to the edge. As the world's leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, Red Hat invests in open ecosystems and communities to solve tomorrow's IT challenges. Collaborating with partners and customers, Red Hat helps them build, connect, automate, secure and manage their IT environments, supported by consulting services and award-winning training and certification offerings.
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