What Is Amazon Elastic Container Registry Public?

Amazon Elastic Container Registry Public is a managed AWS container image registry service that is secure, scalable, and reliable. Amazon ECR supports public image repositories with resource-based permissions using AWS IAM so that specific users can access your public repositories to push images. Developers can use their preferred CLI to push and manage Docker images, Open Container Initiative (OCI) images, and OCI compatible artifacts. Your images are publicly available to pull, either anonymously or using an Amazon ECR Public authentication token.

Note

Amazon ECR supports private container image repositories as well. For more information, see What is Amazon ECR in the Amazon Elastic Container Registry User Guide.

The AWS container services team maintains a public roadmap on GitHub. It contains information about what the teams are working on and allows all AWS customers the ability to give direct feedback. For more information, see AWS Containers Roadmap.

Components of Amazon ECR Public

Amazon ECR Public contains the following components:

Amazon ECR Public Gallery

The Amazon ECR Public Gallery is the public portal that lists all public repositories hosted on Amazon ECR Public. Visit the Amazon ECR Public Gallery at https://gallery.ecr.aws. For more information, see Amazon ECR Public Gallery.

Registry

A public registry is provided to each AWS account; you can create public image repositories in your public registry and store images in them. For more information, see Amazon ECR public registries.

Authorization token

Your client must authenticate to a public registry as an AWS user before it can push images to a public repository. For image pulls, Amazon ECR Public accepts both anonymous pulls and pulls using an authentication token. For more information, see Registry authentication in Amazon ECR public.

Repository

An Amazon ECR image repository contains your Docker images, Open Container Initiative (OCI) images, and OCI compatible artifacts. For more information, see Amazon ECR public repositories.

Repository policy

You can control access to your repositories and the images within them with repository policies. For more information, see Public repository policies in Amazon ECR Public.

Image

You can push and pull container images to your repositories. You can use these images locally on your development system, or you can use them in Amazon ECS task definitions and Amazon EKS pod specifications.

How to get started with Amazon ECR Public

If you've signed up for AWS and have been using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), you are close to being able to use Amazon ECR. The setup process for those two services is similar, as Amazon ECR is an extension of both services. When using the AWS CLI with Amazon ECR, we recommend that you use a version of the AWS CLI that supports the latest Amazon ECR features. If you do not see support for an Amazon ECR feature in the AWS CLI, you should upgrade to the latest version. For more information, see http://aws.amazon.com/cli/.

For a quickstart guide on pushing a container image to Amazon ECR Public repository, see Moving an image through its lifecycle in Amazon ECR Public.