Container Registry release notes

This page documents production updates to Container Registry. You can periodically check this page for announcements about new or updated features, bug fixes, known issues, and deprecated functionality.

You can see the latest product updates for all of Google Cloud on the Google Cloud page, browse and filter all release notes in the Google Cloud console, or programmatically access release notes in BigQuery.

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March 18, 2024

Container Registry is scheduled to be shut down and superseded by Artifact Registry on March 18, 2025. For more information and transition options, see Deprecations.

March 12, 2024

New tooling is available to upgrade from Container Registry to Artifact Registry. For more information on the available tools, see Automate migration to Artifact Registry.

January 08, 2024

Starting January 8, 2024, organizations that haven't previously used Container Registry will have any gcr.io repositories hosted on Artifact Registry by default. For more information on this change, see gcr.io hosted on Artifact Registry.

December 05, 2023

mirror.gcr.io is hosted on Artifact Registry. This change doesn't require you to change your usage of mirror.gcr.io unless you are using it within a VPC service perimeter.

For information on how to use mirror.gcr.io in a VPC service perimeter after the transition to being hosted on Artifact Registry, see Using Artifact Registry with VPC Service Controls.

October 10, 2023

Starting October 10, 2023, mirror.gcr.io is transitioning to being hosted on Artifact Registry. This change is taking place on a region by region basis, and doesn't require you to change your usage of mirror.gcr.io unless you are using it within a VPC service perimeter.

For information on how to use mirror.gcr.io in a VPC service perimeter after the transition to being hosted on Artifact Registry, see Using Artifact Registry with VPC Service Controls.

August 11, 2023

Container Registry storage buckets can no longer be set to public from the Google Cloud Console. To configure public access to images, see Configure public access to images.

June 29, 2023

Container Registry API requests that reference a non existent project respond with 403 (permission denied) instead of 400 (bad request) status.

May 15, 2023

Container Registry is deprecated and is superseded by Artifact Registry. After May 15, 2024. Google Cloud projects without previous Container Registry usage will only host images for the gcr.io domain in Artifact Registry.

Use the following information to help you move to Artifact Registry:

October 01, 2022

New pricing for Cloud Storage takes effect October 1, 2022. Since the cost of Container Registry storage and network egress is based on Cloud Storage pricing, this new pricing applies to Container Registry usage.

The most relevant change for Container Registry is the new network egress pricing for Cloud Storage:

  • Reading data in a Cloud Storage bucket located in a multi-region from a Google Cloud service located in a region on the same continent is no longer free. Instead, such moves are priced the same as general data moves between different locations on the same continent. Since Container Registry only runs in multi-regions, egress to services that only run in regions like Cloud Run and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is always charged.

  • Network egress within Google Cloud no longer depends on the monthly egress traffic you have from your bucket. Instead, pricing is only determined by the locations involved.

Artifact Registry does not currently charge for network egress from a multi-regional repository to a Google Cloud service in a region on the same continent. Learn about transitioning to Artifact Registry.

February 02, 2021

On-Demand Scanning is available in Preview. You can manually scan container images stored locally on your computer or remotely in Container Registry. To get started with manual scanning, see On-Demand Scanning quickstart

October 05, 2020

Starting October 5, the Container Registry Service Agent is granted the Container Registry Service Agent IAM role by default when you enable the Container Registry API. Previously, this account was granted the Editor role.

To learn more about this change and how to update the role on an existing Container Registry service account with Editor permissions, see the Container Registry access control documentation

March 16, 2020

Artifact Registry, the evolution of Container Registry, is now available in beta. It includes support for Docker as well as Maven and npm package formats.

If you currently use Container Registry, see Transitioning from Container Registry for more information.

September 20, 2019

Container Analysis is now Generally Available.

See the documentation for information on how to scan container images for vulnerabilities as well as how to to store and retrieve metadata for container images.

August 26, 2019

V1 Version of the Container Analysis API is now Generally Available.

See the documentation for details about the API.

September 06, 2018

Container Analysis is now available in Beta.

See the documentation for information on how to store and retrieve metadata for container images in Container Registry.

November 22, 2017

Container Analysis is now available in Alpha.

See the documentation for information on how to get vulnerability scanning results.

October 26, 2017

Pub/Sub notifications feature is now available in Beta. See the documentation for more information on how to configure notifications.

March 01, 2017

V1 Version of Docker Registry API is now deprecated.

November 29, 2016

Container Registry now supports the Docker V2 image manifest, schema version 2.

August 05, 2016

The Docker client now allows users to specify a credential store, which acts as a delegate to generate the credentials that are used to authenticate requests to repositories. The Container Registry credential helper, docker-credential-gcr, simplifies authentication for all use cases, including working on a developer machine, working on a VM, and using a service account. This means you no longer have to use the Cloud SDK with Container Registry.

July 31, 2016

Added the Registry API catalog command. Container Registry now implements the catalog feature as described by the Docker Registry API specification.

June 22, 2016

Container Registry now offers a Docker Hub mirror. When a user adds the --registry-mirror=https://<us|eu|asia>-mirror.gcr.io flag to their Docker daemon, any attempt to pull an image from Docker Hub results in a call to Container Registry. If the image is found in the Container Registry mirror, it is pulled from there, and no call is made to Docker Hub. If the image is not found, the client gets a 404 result and can then make a call to Docker Hub to download the image.

June 13, 2016

The Container Registry user interface now shows Docker Registry V2 image formats and V2 image digests.

November 13, 2015

Implemented V2 of the Docker Registry API. See Docker Registry HTTP API V2.

June 22, 2015

Container Registry moved from Beta to GA.

November 12, 2014

Container Registry Beta.

Container Registry is a new service that provides private container repositories for Google Cloud Platform customers to support container development and deployment workflows. Container Registry is currently in Beta; it is suitable for experimentation and is intended to provide an early view of the production service, but customers are strongly encouraged not to run production workloads on it.