Concepts
How does Anchore Enterprise work?
Anchore takes a data-driven approach to analysis and policy enforcement. The system has the following discrete phases for each image analyzed:
- Fetch the image content and extract it, but never execute it.
- Analyze the image by running a set of Anchore analyzers over the image content to extract and classify as much metadata as possible.
- Save the resulting analysis in the database for future use and audit.
- Evaluate policies against the analysis result, including vulnerability matches on the artifacts discovered in the image.
- Update to the latest external data used for policy evaluation and vulnerability matches (feed sync), and automatically update image analysis results against any new data found upstream.
- Notify users of changes to policy evaluations and vulnerability matches.
Repeat step 5 and 6 on intervals to ensure you have the latest external data and updated image evaluations.
The primary interface is a RESTful API that provides mechanisms to request analysis, policy evaluation, and monitoring of images in registries as well as query for image contents and analysis results. Anchore Enterprise also provides a command-line interface (CLI), and its own container.
The following modes provide different ways to use Anchore within the API:
- Interactive Mode - Use the APIs to explicitly request an image analysis, or get a policy evaluation and content reports. The system only performs operations when specifically requested by a user.
- Watch Mode - Use the APIs to configure Anchore Enterprise to poll specific registries and repositories/tags to watch for new images, and then automatically pull and evaluate them. The API sends notifications when a state changes for a tag’s vulnerability or policy evaluation.
Anchore can be easily integrated into most environments and processes using these two modes of operation.
Next Steps
Now let’s get familiar with Images in Anchore.