Artifact Registry is the evolution of Container Registry. As a fully-managed service with support for both container images and non-container artifacts, Artifact Registry extends the capabilities of Container Registry.
If you currently use Container Registry, use the information on this page to learn about transitioning to Artifact Registry.
Overview
Artifact Registry provides the same container management features as Container Registry. You can start transitioning your automation to use Artifact Registry for your containers.
Backwards compatibility and co-existence
You can use both Artifact Registry and Container Registry in the same
project. When you view a list of repositories with gcloud
or
Cloud Console, Artifact Registry also lists Container Registry
repositories in the same project.
Both services will continue to co-exist after Artifact Registry becomes generally available. To take advantage of the expanded capabilities in Artifact Registry, you can transition your containers and your automation to Artifact Registry.
After Artifact Registry becomes generally available, you will have an option to create backwards-compatible repositories. These repositories can help you perform a more gradual update to your automation for builds and deployments with support for:
gcloud container images
commands- Referencing the repository with a
*.pkg.dev
or*.gcr.io
hostname.
To provide compatibility, these repositories will have some feature limitations. In particular, each backwards-compatible repository must be located in the same multi-region as a corresponding Container Registry hostname in your project.
Setting up repositories
In Artifact Registry you must create repositories before you can push images to them. So a key part of moving to Artifact Registry is setting up Artifact Registry repositories and integrating them into your CI/CD automation.
To provide greater flexibility, there are some changes in how Artifact Registry represents repositories.
- Container Registry
Each multi-regional location is associated with a single storage bucket. Organizing your images into repositories under a hostname is optional. Consider the following example that shows the image
webapp
in three locations:us.gcr.io/my-project/webapp us.gcr.io/my-project/team1/webapp us.gcr.io/my-project/team2/webapp
Repositories are only an organizing mechanism and do not restrict access. Any user with access to the storage bucket for
us.gcr.io
in this project can access all versions of thewebapp
container image.- Artifact Registry
Each repository is a separate resource in your project. Since each repository is a unique resource, you can:
- Give each repository a name, description, and labels
- Create multiple repositories in the same location
- Configure repository-specific permissions
In addition, the location of a repository can be a region or a multi-region.
These changes give you more control over your repositories. For example, if you have teams in São Paulo and Sydney, you can create a repository for each team in a region that is geographically closer than the nearest multi-regional location.
southamerica-east1-docker.pkg.dev/my-project/team1/webapp australia-southeast1-docker.pkg.dev/my-project/team2/webapp
You can then grant each team with permissions to their team repository only.
See the setup guide for instructions to transition to Artifact Registry.
Pushing and pulling images
To help you adapt existing configuration, commands, and documentation designed for Container Registry, the following information compares building, pushing, pulling, and deploying images.
Feature comparison
This section summarizes changes and improvements to Container Registry features.
Feature | Container Registry | Artifact Registry |
---|---|---|
Supported formats | Container images only | Multiple artifact formats, including container images, Java packages and Node.js modules. |
Repositories |
|
|
Hostnames | Hosts are on the gcr.io domain. |
Hosts are on the pkg.dev domain. For details on the
name format, see Repository and artifact names. |
Permissions |
|
|
Authentication | Provides several authentication methods for pushing and pulling images with a third-party client. | Artifact Registry supports the same authentication
methods as Container Registry. See Setting up authentication for Docker for details.
If you use the Docker credential helper:
|
Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) | Use CMEK to encrypt the storage buckets that contain your images. | Use CMEK to encrypt individual repositories. |
Using Google Cloud Console | View and manage Container Registry images from the Container Registry section of Cloud Console. | View a list of your Artifact Registry and Container Registry
repositories in the Artifact Registry
section of Cloud Console. Manage your Artifact Registry
repositories and images from this page.
If you click a Container Registry repository, you are directed to the list of images in the Container Registry section of the Cloud Console. |
Using gcloud and API commands | Uses gcloud container images commands. | Uses gcloud artifacts docker commands.
After Artifact Registry becomes generally available, Artifact Registry
will provide an option to create backwards-compatible repositories that
support For a comparison of Container Registry and Artifact Registry gcloud commands, see the gcloud command comparison. Artifact Registry also includes an API for managing repositories and artifacts in all formats. |
Pub/Sub notifications | Publishes changes to the gcr topic. |
Publishes changes to the gcr topic. If you create repositories
in the same project as your existing Container Registry service, your
existing Pub/Sub configuration works automatically.
To learn more, see Configuring Pub/Sub notifications. |
Cached Docker Hub images | Caches
the most frequently requested Docker Hub images on mirror.gcr.io . |
mirror.gcr.io continues to cache frequently
requested images from Docker Hub. |
VPC Service Controls | You can add Container Registry to a service perimeter. | You can add Artifact Registry to a service perimeter. |
Metadata storage and analysis | Container Analysis provides metadata storage, vulnerability scanning, and integration with services that use the metadata such as Binary Authorization. Cloud SDK commands for working with notes and occurrences are under the gcloud container images group. | Container Analysis supports metadata storage and vulnerability
scanning for container images in both Artifact Registry and Container Registry.
|
Google-provided images | Google-provided images are hosted on gcr.io . Examples
include:
|
Google-provided images continue to be available on gcr.io . |
Pricing | Container Registry pricing is based on Cloud Storage usage, including storage and network egress. | Artifact Registry has its own pricing, based on storage and network egress. |