Beyond the Scan: The Future of Snyk Container

At Snyk, our mission has always been to empower developers to build secure applications without slowing down. The importance of a developer-first approach is even more critical with the proliferation of AI use and in the world of cloud-native development. 

This means rethinking container security. It’s no longer enough to just scan a Dockerfile or a finished image at a single point in time. While a Dockerfile in your repository is a great starting point for proactive security, the ultimate source of truth is the container image itself—the final, immutable artifact that you run in production.

From continuous registry monitoring to runtime prioritization, software ecosystem governance, and AI-powered remediation

To truly secure the container lifecycle, teams need more than just runtime visibility. Finding a vulnerability in production is too late; it's a reactive scramble to patch. At the same time, scanning only during development is insufficient. It creates alert fatigue by flooding developers with theoretical issues, and more importantly, it completely misses new vulnerabilities that are disclosed after an image has been built and pushed to a registry.

The future of security is connecting the entire lifecycle: from the developer's IDE, to the CI/CD pipeline, to the container registry, and into production—and then feeding that context back to the developer.

That’s why we’re so excited to share our vision for the future of Snyk Container. We’re moving beyond the scan to deliver a comprehensive, end-to-end security solution built on a developer-first foundation. Here’s a look at what we're building next.

Continuous visibility with Container Registry Sync

The first step in this vision is already available to customers in a closed beta: Container Registry Sync.

The problem

Traditional scanning is a snapshot. You scan an image, push it to your registry, and move on. But days or weeks later, a new high-severity vulnerability (like Log4Shell or a new zero-day) is disclosed for a package in that "clean" image. Your registry is now full of ticking time bombs, and you have no easy way of knowing.

The solution

Container Registry Sync provides continuous, ongoing monitoring for the images you’ve already built and stored at rest. It connects directly to your registries (like Docker Hub, ECR, and more) and gives you a complete, up-to-date inventory of your container assets. When a new vulnerability is discovered, Snyk automatically flags the affected images—no manual re-scan required. Using rich rules, you can specify what in your registry should be scanned by Snyk, and what should automatically be dropped. We are also actively building support for connecting multiple container registries per org, giving organizations the flexibility to monitor their complete, distributed estate.

The value

This eliminates security blind spots in your images and provides the foundational visibility you need to manage risk across your entire application portfolio before the image gets to runtime. It also empowers your team to focus on the most relevant images by curating an accurate, up-to-date catalog of what’s current to prioritize.

Connecting runtime to development to prioritize what matters: 

Once you have full visibility, the next challenge is inevitable: alert fatigue. A container might have 50 vulnerabilities, but how many of them actually pose a risk in your environment?

This is where Snyk is taking its biggest leap forward - we are building functionality to ingest runtime signals. But unlike tools that simply show you what's on fire in production, Snyk will use this data to complete the feedback loop. By understanding which packages are actually loaded into memory, Snyk will provide true risk-based prioritization. 

Initially, this runtime context will be integrated with the new Container Registry Sync service, allowing you to prioritize monitoring and testing images you have running in production. Following that, we will integrate it into Snyk issues as a risk signal and in the new user experience, empowering your teams to prioritize issues based on actual deployed risk.

This moves you from a theoretical list of CVEs to an actionable, prioritized workflow for developers.

We’re excited to get this into your hands. We are planning for the initial beta, which includes runtime insights as a signal for Container Registry Sync, to be available in early 2026.

A reimagined container experience

A powerful product deserves a seamless experience. We are completely reimagining the Snyk Container user experience to bring all this context together. 

The current Snyk experience is great for developers working on a specific application. We are excited to introduce a new, container-centric view that gives you a holistic, queryable inventory of your entire container estate, making it easier than ever for developers and security teams to manage their container security at scale.

This new UX, which will be available in Q1 2026, won't be just another security dashboard. It will be designed from the ground up to surface the most critical information and guide developers through the prioritization and remediation process intuitively.

This new experience is all about bringing context together. Imagine clicking on any container image in your inventory and seeing a single, consolidated overview that unifies everything: essential image details, security test results, and the new runtime context. You'll be able to instantly see which issues are truly exploitable, cutting through the noise and allowing your teams to focus on the fixes that matter, all in one place.

Better security starts with a better foundation

Securing production starts with a secure foundation. The "distroless" and "hardened" image movement has been a massive step forward, and partners like Chainguard, Docker, Ubuntu (Canonical), Minimus, and others are helping developers dramatically reduce their attack surface from day one.

We are working closely with these partners to ensure Snyk provides best-in-class security scanning for all image types. Enhancements will roll out throughout 2025 and into early 2026.

Our philosophy is simple: a hardened image provides an excellent foundation, but it's not the end of the story. Snyk helps you in two critical ways:

1. We verify and continuously monitor the foundation: A hardened image provides a great, secure starting point. Our role is to ensure that the foundation stays secure. New vulnerabilities are discovered daily, so we continuously monitor that base image (just like we do with Container Registry Sync) to ensure it doesn't "soften" over time, alerting you the moment a new flaw is found.

2. We secure what you add: We scan all the application layers, custom configurations, and open source dependencies you add on top, making sure your own code doesn't undermine the secure foundation at every stage in the pipeline - before build, during development, and after deployment.

This two-pronged approach allows you to confidently adopt modern, minimal images while ensuring that your entire application—not just the base—is secure. It’s the best of both worlds: a reduced attack surface from start to finish, and comprehensive security for the code you build on top.

The future is fast, fixed, and governed

Everything we’ve shared is part of our forward-looking vision to find issues and help developers fix them at scale.

We have big plans to make remediation easier than ever, leveraging AI to simplify base image upgrades, predict breakability, and fix Dockerfile instructions. We are also exploring ways to use AI to suggest more granular changes, such as adding or updating individual packages to quickly improve security without requiring a disruptive base image upgrade. This is where the Snyk approach truly shines: we don't just flag a problem at runtime; we give you the fix, in your code, powered by AI.

We also plan to dramatically lower the governance burden for security teams. We've heard from customers that the rapid proliferation of containers, coupled with the speed of AI-driven development, has made it incredibly difficult to manage your security posture effectively. To address this, we are building powerful, flexible policies that span the entire lifecycle. We’re building tools that will allow you to automatically block high-risk images, enforce the use of specific hardened or "golden" base images, manage license compliance to prevent non-compliant licenses from reaching production, and set granular policies for critical vulnerabilities, all from one place.

We are laser-focused on bringing this value to our customers and empowering you to own your container security from code to cloud. Interested in what Snyk Container can do for today? Get a demo! And stay tuned—the best is yet to come.