Amazon Elastic Container Registry FAQs

Q: What is Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)?

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is a fully-managed Docker container registry that makes it easy for developers to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images. Amazon ECR is integrated with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), simplifying your development to production workflow. Amazon ECR eliminates the need to operate your own container repositories or worry about scaling the underlying infrastructure. Amazon ECR hosts your images in a highly available and scalable architecture, allowing you to reliably deploy containers for your applications. Integration with Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) provides resource-level control of each repository.

Q: Why should I use Amazon ECR?

Amazon ECR eliminates the need to operate and scale the infrastructure required to power your container registry. Amazon ECR uses Amazon S3 for storage to make your container images highly available and accessible, allowing you to reliably deploy new containers for your applications. Amazon ECR transfers your container images over HTTPS and automatically encrypts your images at rest. You can configure policies to manage permissions for each repository and restrict access to IAM users, roles, or other Amazon Web Services accounts. Amazon ECR integrates with Amazon ECS and the Docker CLI, allowing you to simplify your development and production workflows. You can easily push your container images to Amazon ECR using the Docker CLI from your development machine, and Amazon ECS can pull them directly for production deployments.

Q: What is the pricing for Amazon ECR?

With Amazon ECR, there are no upfront fees or commitments. You pay only for the amount of data you store in your repositories and data transferred to the Internet.

Q: Is Amazon ECR a global service?

Amazon ECR is a regional service and is designed to give you flexibility in how images are deployed. You have the ability to push/pull images to the same region where your Docker cluster runs for the best performance. You can also access Amazon ECR anywhere that Docker runs such as desktops and on-premises environments. Pulling images between regions or out to the internet will have additional latency and data transfer costs.

Q: Can Amazon ECR host public container images?

Amazon ECR currently supports private images. However, using IAM resource-based permissions, you can configure policies for each repository to allow access to IAM users, roles, or other Amazon Web Services accounts.

Q: What compliance capabilities can I enable on Amazon ECR?

You can use Amazon CloudTrail on Amazon ECR to provide a history of all API actions such as who pulled an image and when tags were moved between images. Administrators can also find which EC2 instances pulled which images.

Q: How do I get started using Amazon ECR?

The best way to get started with Amazon ECR is to use the Docker CLI to push and pull and your first image. Visit our documentation to learn more.

Q: What’s the best way to manage my repositories and images?

Amazon ECR provides a command line interface and APIs to create, monitor, and delete repositories and set repository permissions. You can perform the same actions in the Amazon ECR Management Console, which can be accessed via the “Repositories” section of the Amazon ECS Console. Amazon ECR also integrates with the Docker CLI allowing you to push, pull, and tag images on your development machine.

Q: Does Amazon ECR replicate images across regions?

Yes. Amazon ECR is designed to give you flexibility in where you store and how you deploy your images. You can create deployment pipelines that build images, push them to Amazon ECR in one region, and Amazon ECR can automatically replicate them to other Regions and accounts for deployment to multi-Region clusters. 

Q: Can I use Amazon ECR within local and on-premises environments?

Yes. You can access Amazon ECR anywhere that Docker runs such as desktops and on-premises environments.

Q: Does Amazon ECR provide an Amazon Linux container image?

Yes. Amazon ECR provides Amazon Linux container images, and detailed steps can be found on the forums. Customers can use these container images to run workloads in their Linux-based Docker environment. The container image has a minimal set of packages and is able to install the full set of Amazon Linux AMI packages. Similar to the Amazon Linux AMI in EC2, Amazon Linux container images will get ongoing updates from Amazon in the form of security updates, rolling releases, and package updates.

Q: Does Amazon ECR work with Amazon ECS?

Yes. Amazon ECR is integrated with Amazon ECS allowing you to easily store, run, and manage container images for applications running on Amazon ECS. All you need to do is specify the Amazon ECR repository in your Task Definition and Amazon ECS will retrieve the appropriate images for your applications.

Q: Does Amazon ECR work with Amazon Elastic Beanstalk?

Yes. Amazon Elastic Beanstalk supports Amazon ECR for both single and multi-container Docker environments, allowing you to easily deploy container images stored in Amazon ECR with Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. All you need to do is specify the Amazon ECR repository in your Dockerrun.aws.json configuration and attach the AmazonEC2ContainerRegistryReadOnly policy to your container instance role.

Q: What version of Docker Engine does Amazon ECR support?

Amazon ECR currently supports Docker Engine 1.7.0 and up.

Q: What version of the Docker Registry API does Amazon ECR support?

Amazon ECR supports the Docker Registry V2 API specification.

Q: Will Amazon ECR automatically build images from a Dockerfile?

No. However, Amazon ECR integrates with a number of popular CI/CD solutions to provide this capability. See the Amazon Web Services Partners Page for more information.

Q: Does Amazon ECR support federated access?

Yes. Amazon ECR is integrated with Amazon Identity and Access Management, which supports identity federation for delegated access to the Amazon Management Console or Amazon APIs.

Q: What version of the Docker Image Manifest specification does Amazon ECR support?

Amazon ECR supports the Docker Image Manifest V2, Schema 2 format. In order to maintain backwards compatibility with Schema 1 images, Amazon ECR will continue to accept images uploaded in the Schema 1 format. Additionally, Amazon ECR can down-translate from a Schema 2 to a Schema 1 image when pulling with an older version of Docker Engine (1.9 and below).

Q: Does Amazon ECR support the Open Container Initiative (OCI) format?

Yes. Amazon ECR is compatible with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) image specification letting you push and pull OCI images. Amazon ECR can also translate between Docker Image Manifest V2, Schema 2 images and OCI images on pull.

Q: How does Amazon ECR help ensure that container images are secure?

Amazon ECR automatically encrypts images at rest and transfers your container images over HTTPS. You can configure policies to manage permissions and control access to your images using Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) users and roles without having to manage credentials directly on your EC2 instances.

Q: How can I use Amazon Identity and Access Management for permissions?

You can use IAM resource-based policies to control and monitor who and what (e.g., EC2 instances) can access your container images as well as how, when, and where they can access them. To get started, use the Management Console to create resource-based policies for your repositories. Alternatively, you can use sample policies and attach them to your repositories via the Amazon ECR CLI.

Q: Can I share my images across Amazon Web Services accounts?

Yes, here is an example of how to create and set a policy for cross-account image sharing.