Vulnerability Scanning: Trivy vs the Trivy Operator

Trivy is an open-source, all-in-one cloud-native security scanner (CLI and integrations) that scans container images, Git repos, IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation, Dockerfile), Kubernetes clusters, and cloud accounts for vulnerabilities, exposed secrets, misconfigurations, and dependency issues; it can also generate SBOMs and support attestation with Cosign. The Trivy Operator is a Kubernetes-native component that runs continuous in-cluster scans (vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, secrets, RBAC) and exposes results as Kubernetes CRDs for easier integration with cloud-native toolchains. The document outlines typical developer and CI/CD use cases, differences between ad-hoc CLI scans and continuous operator scans, and provides links to documentation and repositories for further information.