PaymentWorks Fully Automates Container Hardening in the CI/CD Pipeline

There’s nothing more rewarding for us at Slim.AI than helping our customers to reach a new stage of maturity in their container security journey. That’s exactly what we’re seeing now at PaymentWorks, who are now automatically shipping optimized and hardened containers as part of their production CI process.

PaymentWorks first partnered with Slim.AI in 2021 to move away from their legacy “VM-based” approach and integrate a new containerized microservice with Slim’s suite of developer tools. They quickly discovered that Slim’s container management features were helping them to onboard their many new developer hires by creating a common workflow.

“If you have multiple development teams, they employ different patterns for how code comes together to form services,” said PaymentWorks CTO, Alan Greenblatt. “These patterns can be wildly inconsistent and poorly documented, and the knowledge to run them is often tribal, at best. It’s usually the job of DevOps to codify these idiosyncrasies, and there’s never enough DevOps support to go around.”

Using Slim.AI reduced operational complexity, error, and repetitive DevOps cycles by empowering developers to easily review artifacts, analyze and debug their containers via their choice of Slim’s web-based UI or command-line interface. By offloading the complexity of container and artifact management onto Slim, by mid-2022, PaymentWorks was already deep into their conversion to microservices for their Python-base application, and in need of a container optimization solution.

“Engineers are so focused with getting work out the door that they don't have time to focus on the security of new packages,” said Matias Elgart, VP, Platform Engineering for PaymentWorks.

In July 2022, Slim.AI launched their continuous supply chain security solution complete with automated container hardening, with PaymentWorks as their first design partner. Their first container to ship reduced total vulnerability count by 89%, eliminating all Critical, and 60% of High findings. Following this success, PaymentWorks is implementing the solution across all their containers.

The impact of this successful partnership is twofold: Firstly, Slim’s automatic container minification cuts out operational complexity, error, and repetitive DevOps cycles, freeing up PaymentWorks’ teams to continue building great software for their customers and creating a positive developer experience.

Equally mission-critical, Slim automatically keeps track of all container versions for each collection, runs vulnerability scanners, hardens containers, and generates SBOMs. For an enterprise payments security platform like PaymentWorks, this represents a leap forward in security and competitiveness. Read the full case study (PDF) >