Amazon Elastic Container Registry Documentation

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) is integrated with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which means you can store and run container images for applications with either orchestrator. All you need to do is specify the Amazon ECR repository in your task or pod definition for Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS to retrieve the appropriate images for your applications.

Amazon ECR supports Open Container Initiative (OCI) standards and the Docker Registry HTTP API V2. This allows you to use Docker CLI commands (e.g., push, pull, list, tag) or your preferred Docker tools to interact with Amazon ECR, maintaining your existing development workflow. You can access Amazon ECR from any Docker environment, whether in the cloud, on-premises, or on your local machine. Amazon ECR lets you store Docker container images and related OCI artifacts in your repositories. 

You can discover and use container software that vendors, open source projects, and community developers share publicly in the Amazon ECR public gallery. Popular base images such as operating systems, AWS-published images, Kubernetes add-ons, and files, such as Helm charts, can be found in the gallery. You don’t need to use an AWS account to search or pull a public image.

Amazon ECR stores both the containers you create and any container software you buy through AWS Marketplace. AWS Marketplace for Containers offers verified container software for performance computing, security, and developer tools, as well as software as a service (SaaS) products that manage, analyze, and protect container applications. 

Amazon ECR stores your container images and artifacts in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Amazon S3 creates and stores copies of all S3 objects across multiple systems. Amazon ECR can also replicate your data to multiple AWS Regions for your high availability applications.

Amazon ECR supports the ability to define and organize repositories in your registry using namespaces. This allows you to organize your repositories based on your team’s existing workflows. You can set which API actions another user may perform on your repository (e.g., create, list, describe, delete, and get) through resource-level policies, allowing you to share your repositories with different users and AWS accounts.  

Amazon ECR uses AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control and monitor who and what (e.g., EC2 instances) can access your container images. Through IAM, you can define policies to allow users within the same AWS account or other accounts to access your container images in private repositories. You can also further refine these policies by specifying different permissions for different users and roles (e.g., push, pull, or full administrator access).  

You can transfer your container images to and from Amazon ECR via HTTPS. Your images are encrypted using Amazon S3 server-side encryption. Amazon ECR also lets you choose your own key managed by AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to encrypt images at rest. 

Amazon ECR is integrated with many third-party developer tools. You can integrate Amazon ECR into your continuous integration and delivery process, allowing you to maintain your existing development workflow. Learn more about our third-party integration on our Partners page.

With Amazon ECR pull through cache repositories, you can retrieve, store, and sync container artifacts stored in publicly accessible container registries. They offer high download rates, availability, security, and scale. With frequent registry syncs and no additional tools to manage, pull through cache repositories help you keep container images sourced from public registries up to date. 

For additional information about service controls, security features and functionalities, including, as applicable, information about storing, retrieving, modifying, restricting, and deleting data, please see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/index.html. This additional information does not form part of the Documentation for purposes of the AWS Customer Agreement available at http://aws.amazon.com/agreement, or other agreement between you and AWS governing your use of AWS’s services.