Announcing our new Container Registry

Today we’re announcing our new Container Registry service which makes it easy to store and retrieve your Docker container images.

It’s nicely integrated with existing Brightbox services — all container image data is stored in Orbit, our durable and highly-available object storage system, and access is controlled using your user credentials or API Clients.

There’s no additional cost for using the Container Registry service, just the underlying Orbit storage usage.

$ docker login cr.brightbox.com
Username: john@example.com
Password:

$ docker tag myapp:latest cr.brightbox.com/acc-xxxxx/myapp/myapp:latest
$ docker push cr.brightbox.com/acc-xxxxx/myapp/myapp:latest

When deploying applications to servers, deployment systems will often clone your app’s code to your servers from a remote git service and run a few tasks to make it ready for launching, such as installing/building any dependencies.

Containerised deployments instead use a container image — a self-contained copy of your application and its dependencies. The container image is built prior to deployment (usually using Docker) by the developer (or better yet, by a CI system!) and all dependencies are installed and built at that time. The result is, essentially, encapsulated in a tar file and needs to be made available to deployment systems (such as Kubernetes).

And that’s where our Container Registry comes in. Push your images to the registry and pull from them during deployment. Just as with a git repository, you give your developers and CI systems push access and give your deployment systems only pull access. You can organise your container images into separate repositories and control access independently.

Our service integrates fully with our Orbit storage system, so all your Docker container image data is stored in your own Orbit storage “buckets” (confusingly, currently also called containers!). Access to the Container Registry is controlled via your Brightbox user credentials or, for automated systems, via API client credentials — just as when you access Orbit directly.

Storage is charged at the usual Orbit rate of 5p per gig per month. Data transfer costs for pulls are 6p per gigabyte from outside Brightbox and free within. So, if you’re deploying to Brightbox Cloud Servers, data transfer is free!

The docs contain all the details you need to know to get started and it’s available today in beta.

Let us know how you get on!

Image credit: RageZ