Prepare for Container Registry shutdown

Determine your next steps to prepare for the shutdown of Container Registry.

Container Registry is deprecated and scheduled for shutdown on March 18, 2025. Artifact Registry is the recommended service for container image storage and management on Google Cloud. Artifact Registry provides the same container management features as Container Registry and it includes additional features and benefits.

For more information about the Container Registry deprecation, see Container Registry Deprecation.

What do I have to do?

If you have container images in Container Registry that you want to keep using, or you use a service that depends on Container Registry, such as App Engine, then you must upgrade to use Artifact Registry repositories.

What happens after March 18, 2025

The Container Registry shutdown has three stages:

• Effective March 18, 2025, writing images to Container Registry is unavailable.
• Effective April 22, 2025, reading images in Container Registry is unavailable.
• Effective May 22, 2025, if you have completed the steps to set up gcr.io repositories in Artifact Registry, then pushing to gcr.io endpoints stores images in Artifact Registry and all Container Registry repositories are served from Artifact Registry. Any images in Container Registry that haven't been copied to Artifact Registry are unavailable.

Identify Container Registry usage and choose a transition option

1. Identify Container Registry usage within your Google Cloud project, folder, or organization. You can use our Container Registry usage tool to determine if you are using Container Registry.

2. If you have container images in Container Registry that you want to keep using, then determine which transition option you want to follow.

3. If you don't need any of the images stored in Container Registry, then you can set up Artifact Registry standard repositories or Artifact Registry gcr.io repositories.

   To learn about the differences between Container Registry and Artifact Registry review the following:

   • Map IAM roles from Container Registry to Artifact Registry
   • Changes for Docker
   • Changes for building and deploying in Google Cloud
   • Transition to standard repositories
   • Set up repositories with gcr.io domain support

Use our transition tooling

Use the automatic migration tool to transition from Container Registry to gcr.io repositories hosted on Artifact Registry or to standard Artifact Registry repositories.

The automatic migration tool can perform the following actions depending on the transition path you choose:

• Create gcr.io repositories or standard repositories in Artifact Registry for each of your listed gcr.io projects in the corresponding region.
• Suggest an IAM policy for each repository and apply the policy or skip application depending on user preference.
• Redirect all traffic from gcr.io endpoints to Artifact Registry.
• Copy all container images stored in Container Registry to your Artifact Registry gcr.io repositories or standard repositories, even if you have already enabled redirection.

For instructions on how to use the automatic migration tool, see Automatically upgrade to Artifact Registry.

Validate your automation and integrations

Verify that existing automation and integration with services such as Cloud Build, Google Kubernetes Engine, or Cloud Functions work as expected.

Clean up Container Registry images

When redirection is enabled, commands to delete images in gcr.io paths delete images in the corresponding Artifact Registry gcr.io repository, but they don't delete images stored on Container Registry hosts.

After you have validated that all projects work with the transition option you've chosen, and all images you want to keep have been copied to Artifact Registry, you can delete the Container Registry storage buckets. For instructions on how to delete Cloud Storage buckets, see Clean up images in Container Registry.