Posted On: Dec 8, 2020
Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) now supports cross region replication of images in private repositories, enabling developers to easily copy container images across multiple AWS accounts and regions with a single push to a source repository. Storing images in-region to your infrastructure helps applications start up faster as image download time is reduced due to lower latency, and removes cross region downloads that helps with region isolation. Geographically dispersed images also helps you meet backup and disaster recovery requirements for your application. By creating a simple way to reliably replicate images across regions, Amazon ECR now makes it even easier to run highly available applications in AWS.
Container-based applications can consist of many images running on infrastructure distributed across different locations for high availability. Developers build, store, and quickly deploy these images in multiple places, often daily as enterprises increasingly adopt modern CI/CD practices. Each image must be stored in a repository, then reliably pushed to multiple other repositories. Images are often also copied across accounts as part of application pipeline workflows, for example when being promoted from staging to production. AWS customers today have to create custom solutions and write extra code to manage image distribution, adding operational burden and maintenance cost to their processes.
Cross region replication for private repositories in Amazon ECR makes image copy across multiple AWS accounts and regions as simple as selecting destinations and pushing an image into a source repository. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, or using the AWS CLI, developers can select destination accounts and regions to automatically replicate their images. On an image push into this source repository, ECR will automatically replicate to all configured replication destinations. Cross region replication is available in all public AWS Regions where ECR is available. Learn more with our blog and get started by following our documentation.