Google Launches Private Docker Repositories For Cloud Platform Users
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Image Credits: Ivan Mlinaric / Flickr under a CC BY 2.0 license. (Image has been modified)
Google today announced the beta launch of the Google Container Registry for its Cloud Platform. This new service allows developers to host, share and manage their private Docker container repositories on the company’s cloud computing platform.
By default, Docker offers its own public images registry so developers can quickly install anything from a basic unadorned Ubuntu machine to servers that have already been set up to run WordPress, mongoDB, Hadoop or virtually any other server package you can think of. Many businesses have no interest in publishing their containers to a public repository, of course. They can run their own private repositories or use services like Quay.io that offer this feature as a cloud-based service. At its core, that’s what Google’s Container Registry does, too, but with a focus on Google’s own cloud computing platform.
As with all of Google’s Cloud Platform projects in beta, the Container Registry is currently available free of charge and open to all developers.
Here is what Google says the advantages of going with its system are:
- Access control: The registry service hosts your private images in Google Cloud Storage under your Google Cloud Platform project. This ensures by default that your private images can only be accessed by members of your project, enabling them to securely push and pull images through the Google Cloud SDK command line. Container host VMs can then access secured images without additional effort.
- Server-side encryption: Your private images are automatically encrypted before they are written to disk.
- Fast and reliable deployment: Your private images are stored in Google Cloud Storage and cached in our datacenters, ready to be deployed to Google Container Engine clusters or Google Compute Engine container optimized VMs over Google Cloud Platform’s Andromeda based network fabric.
Google made an early bet on Docker, likely because it always used containers as a core feature of its own infrastructure, too. It has heavily invested in open-source projects like Kubernetes, for example, and it launched its dedicated Container Engine service last November.
It’s worth noting that Amazon launched its EC2 Container Service last November. While developers can use it with any third-party Docker registry, Amazon itself does not currently offer a registry service.
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