Publishing Docker Images Using ECR

Docker registries are a critical component of the Docker and container ecosystem, providing a universal mechanism to publish and distribute your container applications, both publicly and privately.

The ECR provides a fully-managed private Docker registry that features tight integration with the ECS components introduced in the previous chapter and other AWS services. ECR is highly scalable, secure, and offers tooling to integrate with the native Docker client that is used to build and publish Docker images.

In this chapter, you will learn how to create ECR repositories to store your Docker images, using a variety of mechanisms, including the AWS console, AWS CLI, and CloudFormation. Once you have established your first ECR repository, you will learn how to authenticate with ECR, pull Docker images stored in your repositories, and build and publish Docker images to ECR using the Docker client. To close out this chapter, you will learn how to deal with more advanced scenarios of using and managing ECR, including configuring cross-account access to allow Docker clients running in other AWS accounts access to your ECR repositories, and configuring lifecycle policies, which ensure orphaned Docker images are periodically cleaned up, reducing administrating effort and cost.

The following topics will be covered:

• Understanding ECR
• Creating ECR repositories
• Logging into ECR
• Publishing Docker images to ECR
• Pulling Docker images from ECR
• Configuring lifecycle policies