Welcome to day 2 of our 5-part series on Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs). In our previous post, we covered the basics of SBOMs and why they’re essential for modern software security. Now, we’re ready to roll up our sleeves and get technical.
This post is designed for hands-on practitioners—the engineers, developers, and security professionals who want to move from theory to implementation. We’ll explore practical tools and techniques for generating, integrating, and leveraging SBOMs in your development workflows.
Getting Started: Step-by-Step SBOM Generation Guides
Ready to generate your first SBOM? How to Generate an SBOM with Free, Open Source Tools will guide you through everything you need to know.
What you’ll learn:
- A list of the 4 most popular SBOM generation tools
- How to install and configure Syft
- How to scan source code, a container or a file directory’s supply chain composition
- How to generate an SBOM in CycloneDX or SPDX formats based on the supply chain composition scan
- A decision framework for evaluating and choosing an SBOM generator
Generating accurate SBOMs is the foundation of your software supply chain transparency initiative. Without SBOMs, valuable use-cases like vulnerability management, compliance audit management or license management are low-value, time sinks instead of efficient, value-add activities.
Follow the step by step guide on the blog.
If you’re looking for step-by-step guides for popular ecosystems like Javascript, Python, GitHub or Docker 👈follow the links).
Under the Hood: How SBOM Generation Works
For those interested in the gory technical details of how a software composition analysis (SCA) tool and SBOM generator scale this function, How Syft Scans Software to Generate SBOMs is the perfect blog post to scratch that intellectual itch.
What you’ll learn:
- The scanning algorithms that identify software components
- How Syft handles package ecosystems (npm, PyPI, Go modules, etc.)
- Performance optimization techniques for large codebases
- Ways to contribute to the open source project
Understanding the “how” behind the SBOM generation process enables you to troubleshoot edge cases and customize tools when you’re ready to squeeze the most value from your SBOM initiative.
Pro tip: Clone the Syft repository and step through the code with a debugger to really understand what’s happening during a scan. It’s the developer equivalent of taking apart an engine to see how it works.
Advancing with Policy-as-Code
Our guide, The Developer’s Guide to SBOMs & Policy-as-Code, bridges the gap between generating SBOMs and automating the SBOM use-cases that align with business objectives. A policy-as-code strategy allows many of the use-cases to scale in cloud native environments and deliver outsized value.
What you’ll learn:
- How to automate tedious compliance tasks with PaC and SBOMs
- How to define security policies (via PaC) that leverage SBOM data
- Integration patterns for CI/CD pipelines
- How to achieve continuous compliance with automated policy enforcement
Combining SBOMs with policy-as-code creates a force multiplier for your security efforts, allowing you to automate compliance and vulnerability management at scale.
Pro tip: Start with simple policies that flag known CVEs, then gradually build more sophisticated rules as your team gets comfortable with the approach
Taking the Next Step
After dipping your feet into the shallow end of SBOM generation and integration, the learning continues with an educational track on scaling SBOMs for enterprise-grade deployments. In our next post, we’ll lay out how to take your SBOM initiative from proof-of-concept to production, with insights on automation, management, and real-world case studies.
Stay tuned for part three of our series, “DevOps-Scale SBOM Management,” where we’ll tackle the challenges of implementing SBOMs across large teams and complex environments.
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