ipdr VS registry.k8s.io

IPDR is a service to allow for images stored on IPFS to be accessible over Docker Registry HTTP API V2 Spec

Probably. You still need to store and serve the data somewhere of course but for even moderately successful open source organizations they will likely find volunteer mirrors. The nice thing about IPFS is that new people can start mirroring content without any risk or involvement, new mirrors are auto-discovered, like bittorrent.

It seems like the docker registry format isn't completely static so I don't think you can just use a regular HTTP gateway to access but there is https://github.com/ipdr/ipdr which seems to be a docker registry built on IPFS.

> We'd still need a registry for mapping the image name to CID, along with users/teams/etc.

IPNS is fairly good for this. You can use a signing key to get a stable ID for your images or if you want a short memorable URL you can publish a DNS record and get /ipns/docker.you.example/.

Of course now you have pushed responsibility of access control to your DNS or by who has access to the signing key.

If you stop to think about, what AWS is selling here, it's quite funny. Most of the infrastructure behind registry.k8s.io is hosted on AWS (and also GCP). So AWS essentially tells you: Don't trust the upstream registry, it might go down, cache it on your own registry, hosted also by us.

For example: if you only allow cluster autoscaler and metrics server from registry.k8s.io you can pull those images through the cache as someone who has create repo IAM privileges. If someone without create repo privileges tries to pull a new image it will fail because they can't create the initial repo.

https://registry.k8s.io (the root url at /) redirects you to https://github.com/kubernetes/registry.k8s.io where we have an issue tracker.

❗ This container is having trouble accessing https://registry.k8s.io

Hosting a forwarding / redirect server instead of actually hosting images is probably a decent idea.

The K8s proxy is redirecting from only hosting on GCR to community-owned registries - https://kubernetes.io/blog/2023/03/10/image-registry-redirec...

You can view the code here - https://github.com/kubernetes/registry.k8s.io

But because everyone is already pointing at gcr.io (just like many openfaas users point at docker.io/) - they're having to do a huge campaign to announce the new URL - the same would apply with the author's solution here.

I wrote some automation for hosting (not redirects) in arkade with the OSS registry - Get a TLS-enabled Docker registry in 5 minutes - https://blog.alexellis.io/get-a-tls-enabled-docker-registry-...

The registry is also something you can run on a VM if you so wish, and have act as a pull through cache.

Apart from reliability - GitHub's container registry is the current next best option - but we have to ask ourselves, what happens when they start charging or the outages start to last longer or are more frequent than 1-2 times per week as we've seen in Q1 2023.

One annoyance with how docker images are specified is they include the location where they are stored. So if you want to change where you store you image you break everyone.

I wonder if what regsitry.k8s.io does could be generalized:

https://github.com/kubernetes/registry.k8s.io/blob/main/cmd/...

The idea is the depending on which cloud you are pulling the image from, they will use the closest blob store to service the request. This also has the effect that you could change the source of truth for the registry without breaking all Dockerfiles.

If you are using updated helm charts then most of them have already replaced with registry.k8s.io, for example nginx ingress so not really breaking change.