Amazon Elastic Container Registry Public: A New Public Container Registry

In November, we announced that we intended to create a public container registry, and today at AWS re:Invent, we followed through on that promise and launched Amazon Elastic Container Registry Public (ECR Public).

ECR Public allows you to store, manage, share, and deploy container images for anyone to discover and download globally. You have long been able to host private container images on AWS with Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), and now with the release of ECR Public, you can host public ones too, enabling anyone (with or without an AWS account) to browse and pull your published container artifacts.

As part of the announcement, a new website allows you to browse and search for public container images, view developer provided details, and discover the commands you need to pull containers.

If you check the website out now, you will see we have hosted some of our container images on the registry, including including the Amazon EKS Distro images. We also have hundreds of images from partners such as Bitnami, Canonical and HashiCorp.

Publishing A Container
Before I can upload a container, I need to create a repository. There is now a Public tab in the Repositories section of the Elastic Container Registry console. In this tab, I click the button Create repository.

I am taken to the Create repository screen, where I select that I would like the repository to be public.

I give my repository the name news-blog and upload a logo that will be used on the gallery details page. I provide a description and select Linux as the Content type, There is also an option to select the CPU architectures that the image supports, if you have a multi-architecture image you can select more than one architecture type. The content types are used for filtering on the gallery website, this will enable people using the gallery to filter their searches by architecture and operating system support.

I enter some markdown in the About section. The text I enter here will be displayed on the gallery page and would ordinarily explain what’s included in the repository, any licensing details, or other relevant information. There is also a Usage section where I enter some sample text to explain how to use my image and that I created the repository for a demo. Finally, I click Create repository.

Back at the repository page, I now have one public repository. There is also a button that says View push commands. I click on this so I can learn more about how to push containers to the repository.

I follow the four steps contained in this section. The first step helps me authenticate with ECR Public so that I can push containers to my repository. Steps two, three, and four show me how to build, tag, and push my container to ECR Public.

The application that I have containerized is a simple app that runs and outputs a terminal message. I use the docker CLI to push my container to my repository, it’s quite a small container, so it only takes a minute or two.

Once complete, I head over to the ECR Public gallery and can see that my image is now publicly available for anyone to pull.

Pulling A Container
You pull containers from ECR Public using the familiar docker pull command with the URL of the image.

You can easily find this URL on the ECR Public website, where the image URL is displayed along with other published information. Clicking on the URL copies the image URL to your clipboard for an easy copy-paste.

ECR Public image URLs are in the format public.ecr.aws/<namespace>/<image>:<tag>

For example, if I wanted to pull the image I uploaded earlier, I would open my terminal and run the following command (please note: you will need docker installed locally to run these commands).

docker pull public.ecr.aws/r6g9m2o3/news-blog:latest

I have now download the Docker Image onto my machine, and I can run the container using the following command:

docker run public.ecr.aws/r6g9m2o3/news-blog:latest

My application runs and writes a message from Jeff Barr. If you are wondering about the switches and parameters I have used on my docker run command, it’s to make sure that the log is written in color because we wouldn’t want to miss out on Jeff’s glorious purple hair.

Nice to Know
ECR Public automatically replicates container images across two AWS Regions to reduce download times and improve availability. Therefore, using public images directly from ECR Public may simplify your build process if you were previously creating and managing local copies. ECR Public caches image layers in Amazon CloudFront, to improve pull performance for a global audience, especially for popular images.

ECR Public also has some nice integrations that will make working with containers easier on AWS. For example, ECR Public will automatically notify services such as AWS CodeBuild to rebuild an application when a public container image changes.

Pricing
All AWS customers will get 50 GB of free storage each month, and if you exceed that limit, you will pay nominal charges. Check out the pricing page for details.

Anyone who pulls images anonymously will get 500 GB of free data bandwidth each month, after which they can sign up or sign in to an AWS account to get more. Simply authenticating with an AWS account increases free data bandwidth up to 5 TB each month when pulling images from the internet.

Finally, workloads running in AWS will get unlimited data bandwidth from any region when pulling publicly shared images from ECR Public.

Verification and Namespaces
You can create a custom namespace such as your organization or project name to be used in a ECR Public URL subdomain unless it’s a reserved namespace. Namespaces such as sagemaker and eks that identify AWS services are reserved. Namespaces that identify AWS Marketplace sellers are also reserved.

Available Today
ECR Public is available today and you can find out more over on the product page. Visit the gallery to explore and use available public container software and log into the ECR Console to share containers publicly.

Happy Containerizing!