confluence

What is Confluence?

The Confluence image packages Atlassian's Confluence, the team workspace and wiki platform, so you can run a self-managed instance in a container. Confluence is used to create, organize, and collaborate on documentation — engineering runbooks, product requirements, knowledge bases, meeting notes, and company intranets — with spaces, pages, templates, macros, and a large ecosystem of marketplace apps, and it integrates tightly with Jira. The image runs the Confluence Java application, listens on port 8090 by default, stores its data in an external relational database such as PostgreSQL, and keeps attachments, indexes, and configuration in a shared home directory that is mounted as a persistent volume. It is used by IT and knowledge-management teams running Confluence themselves, and by platform teams operating it on Docker or Kubernetes with a reproducible, version-pinned image.

What is Echo's Confluence image?

Echo's Confluence image is a hardened build of Confluence on Echo's hardened base. Echo images are designed to be a drop-in replacement: swap the image reference in your Dockerfile or deployment manifest and CVEs go to zero without disrupting your confluence.cfg.xml, database connections, marketplace apps, and the shared home directory. Every image is tested across clouds, image use cases, and deployment targets. Echo ships every image in two variants:

• Distroless variant — optimized for runtime use, with the smallest possible attack surface
• Default variant — includes essential build tools, package managers, and shells for teams that need operational access

For production Confluence deployments, the distroless variant keeps all runtime operations — page rendering, search indexing, attachment storage, and user authentication — fully intact while minimizing exposure; the default variant suits IT and platform teams that need shell access for inspecting application logs, adjusting JVM settings, or troubleshooting plugins and indexing.

What is the difference between Echo's Confluence image and the public Confluence image?

Public Confluence images ship on bases that include OS-level tooling convenient for development but which contribute CVEs that accumulate on a collaboration application used in production. Confluence images run continuously with access to internal documentation, user credentials, session data, and database credentials. OS-level CVEs in the base image — particularly in libraries such as openssl, libxml2, fontconfig, and the libraries bundled with the JVM — create exploitable paths that bypass application-layer controls entirely, allowing attackers to move from a network-reachable service to host-level access. For teams running Confluence across many environments, the image is also a steady source of scanner noise in the CI pipeline — every package in the base becomes a finding your security team must triage, even when none of it is reachable from the service. Echo's build retains everything Confluence needs for page rendering, search indexing, attachment storage, and user authentication while removing the packages that don't belong in a production Confluence collaboration application. As we covered in our post on how to protect your company from software supply chain attacks, long-running services that hold sensitive data and listen on the network are among the widest attack surfaces in the container stack. Echo commits to a 7-day SLA for critical and high severity vulnerabilities, and 10 days for medium, low, and unknown — with vulnerabilities triaged within 24 hours. Echo images are recognized by all major scanners and mirrored to all major registries, so they fit into existing pipelines without changing your registry, scanner, or runtime tooling.

FAQ

Can I replace my Confluence image with Echo's Confluence image?

Yes. Echo's Confluence image is a drop-in replacement. Update the FROM line in your Dockerfile and your workloads keep running. Database connections, the shared home directory, SSO and LDAP settings, marketplace apps, and reverse proxy configuration all continue to work without changes to your spaces, pages, or user data.

Is Echo's Confluence image FIPS-validated?

Yes. Echo's FIPS-validated images use cryptographic modules with an active FIPS 140-3 CMVP certificate, making them fit for federal use — unlike FIPS-compliant images that haven't been validated. This matters for teams running Confluence workloads inside FedRAMP boundaries, where a collaboration application that serves internal documentation and authenticates users, often through SSO must meet cryptographic requirements across the full stack — including the OpenSSL and TLS libraries bundled with the Confluence image.

What is Echo's vulnerability management SLA on the Confluence image?

Echo commits to a 7-day SLA for critical and high severity vulnerabilities, and 10 days for medium, low, and unknown — with vulnerabilities triaged within 24 hours. Patches are mirrored automatically into your private registry so you're always running a clean version — critical for a long-running service that holds internal documentation, user credentials, session data, and database credentials and is reachable over the network.

Is Echo's Confluence image distroless?

Echo ships every image in two variants: a distroless variant optimized for runtime use, and a default variant that includes essential build tools, package managers, and shells. For production Confluence deployments, the distroless variant is the leaner, more secure choice; for IT and platform teams that need shell access for inspecting application logs, adjusting JVM settings, or troubleshooting plugins and indexing, the default variant is the right fit.

How does Echo achieve such a drastic CVE reduction in Confluence?

Echo's Confluence image is built from source with only the absolute essentials needed to run the Confluence collaboration application, which significantly shrinks the attack surface. Echo also patches aggressively over time, with backports available so you can stay on the Confluence version your applications and their dependencies are certified against — avoiding a disruptive upgrade forced purely by OS-level vulnerabilities in the base image rather than by your own requirements.

Will Echo's Confluence image help us achieve FedRAMP?

Yes. The hard parts of FedRAMP — managing vulnerabilities, applying fixes, and using FIPS-validated cryptography — are baked into Echo images, including STIG-hardened configuration and ConMon/POA&M-ready reporting. For IT and platform teams running Confluence under an ATO — whether that's an internal engineering wiki, a program documentation hub, or a knowledge base for a regulated environment — Echo's hardened Confluence image keeps the collaboration application layer in-boundary and compliant without requiring custom hardening scripts or manual base image patching between compliance cycles.

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