Google Cloud Platform now has its own private registry to host Docker images. This enables DevOps teams to securely store and retrieve Docker images.
Google is one of the first public cloud platforms to invest in container technologies. It first added container optimized VMs to Google Compute Engine (GCE) followed by Managed VMs to Google App Engine (GAE). Kubernetes, an open source container orchestration and cluster management tool from Google has become popular among Docker users. Google Container Engine (GKE), a container hosting environment built on top of GCE was announced at Google Cloud Platform Live event in November 2014. Google Container Registry is the latest addition to the stack that aims to support all the above technologies through secure and faster image hosting.
According to the official blog post, Google Container Registry offers better access control, server-side encryption and faster deployment of containers. The private registry is integrated with Google Cloud Storage for persisting the images. It is also integrated with Google Accounts for authentication and role based security. Project owners will be able to pull and push images into the private registry while users with read and view permissions can only pull the images. Google has updated the command line tools support the new container registry.
zulily, an eCommerce company is an early adopter of Google Container Registry. Steve Reed, Principal Engineer, Core Engineering at zulily mentioned that Google’s container registry provided them with a complete Docker registry that was integrated into their development and deployment workflow.
Google is not charging the usage of Container Registry during the beta but Cloud Storage charges for storage and network resources consumed by private images are charged based on the standard pricing.