Two people. Not just another platform
customcontainer.io is built by Arne Blankerts and Tillmann Schiffler — two PHP people with a combined three decades of shipping, securing and rescuing other companies' applications. Most projects we walk into still run on hand-maintained servers, because containerising them looks like a project of its own. The rest start from a base image full of software nobody can name. So we made it dynamic.
Arne Blankerts
Security, Infrastructure & the hard questions
Arne is an internationally sought-after consultant specialising in web security, infrastructure automation and DevOps, author of open-source tooling used across the PHP ecosystem and co-author of several technical books. customcontainer started as his idea. After years of walking into client projects and finding the same thing — production images stuffed with software nobody could account for, and no practical way to slim them down — he stopped treating it as an unavoidable cost of doing PHP and started building the way out.
That idea is now everywhere in customcontainer you cannot see it: the extension scanner that maps every .so back to the RPM it came from, the per-layer rebuild pipeline that gets a security fix to you within hours, and the stubborn insistence that an image should contain nothing you did not ask for.
Tillmann Schiffler
Product, Platform & pragmatism under pressure
Tillmann brings 15+ years of PHP development spanning startups to enterprise corporations. He has led eCommerce projects end to end, guided on-site teams and modernised legacy applications — and delivered some of Europe's highest-load web platforms as well as realtime telecom solutions.
He is the one teams call when a project is already on fire — known for pragmatic problem-solving and for getting a stalled release out of the door long after the deadline was supposed to save it. That is the part of customcontainer you do see: paste a composer.lock, get a pullable image — no build pipeline, no onboarding call, no ceremony.
“ We got tired of explaining to security audits why a PHP image ships an IMAP client nobody uses. So we stopped shipping it. Arne & Tillmann
You reach us, not a queue.
A question about a missing extension, an odd composer.lock, a stack we have never seen — write to us and one of the two of us answers. Usually the same day, always with a name attached.
We use it ourselves.
Every image customcontainer builds is the kind of image we run in our own projects and recommend to our own clients. If something is uncomfortable to operate, we feel it first.
Built to outlast the hype.
No funding round to answer to and no pivot on the roadmap. This is a tool made by two consultants who intend to still be maintaining PHP systems in ten years.
Say hello
Tell us what your stack needs.
Missing an extension, running an unusual setup, or just curious whether this fits your project? Write to us — you will get an answer from a person, not a form letter.
Contact
The fastest way to reach us is email. We read everything ourselves.
customcontainer.io
A project by Arne Blankerts and Tillmann Schiffler.
Tillmann SchifflerAm Pulverhof 46
22147 Hamburg
Germany