Amazon Elastic Container Registry features

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 easily 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; however, using your account makes it easier and faster to use public container software.

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 high 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 is designed for 99.999999999% (11 9’s) of data durability because it automatically creates and stores copies of all S3 objects across multiple systems. This means that your data is available when needed and protected against failures, errors, and threats. Amazon ECR can also automatically 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 easily with different users and AWS accounts. You can easily share your container artifacts with anyone in the world by storing them in a public repository.

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). Anyone in the world can access your container images stored in public repositories for worldwide collaboration.

You can transfer your container images to and from Amazon ECR via HTTPS. Your images are also automatically encrypted at rest 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 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’s pull through cache repositories, you can retrieve, store, and sync container artifacts stored in publicly accessible container registries. They offer the high download rates that you need and the availability, security, and scale that you’ve come to depend on. 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.