registry.k8s.io VS multipass

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.

Install Multipass from https://multipass.run

Multipass orchestrates virtual Ubuntu instances

Multipass I love Multipass for quick Ubuntu instances spun up for testing or as a playground. Wish I would have known and used of it sooner.

If you just need Ubuntu then you can try "Multipass" from Canonical (https://multipass.run/). Works quite well on my M2 Air. I haven't tried using Linux GUI with it though as I need only terminal based VMs.

Multipass is pretty clutch for trivial VMs on MacOs for sure. I use it for a bunch of ssh jump boxes running vpns to different sites. The macOS build does not support custom images (lest not without [some truly insane hacks](https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1260#issuecomm...) , which doesn’t really matter for what I use it for but it is kind of a bummer. If you need something with a little more grunt but don’t want to go full blown with writing your own QEMU tooling or fussing with something like UTM or Parallels, [quickemu](https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu) is a really nice qemu wrapper with sane defaults that can expose a whole lot of power if you need it.

I would be cautious or even distrustful of using anything from Oracle. VirtualBox components come under three different licenses - GPLv2, personal use & evaluation license, and an enterprise license. Their VirtualBox license FAQ [1] gives them enough leeway to change future licenses at will. If an exploit is discovered in your old VirtualBox and they've changed the license, you're out of luck.

We've moved our development to KVM and Virtual Machine Manager on Linux [3] and UTM on Mac [4]. There are other options to run your VM, such as Multipass [5] or VirtualBuddy [6].

On a digressive topic - it was fun migrating our legacy application server stack from Oracle Java (old & poorly considered decision) to OpenJDK, thanks to their license [2].

[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ

[2] https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/jdk-faqs.htm...

[3] https://ubuntu.com/blog/kvm-hyphervisor

[4] https://mac.getutm.app/

[5] https://multipass.run/

[6] https://github.com/insidegui/VirtualBuddy

How does it compare to https://multipass.run/?

If you have a reasonably beefy computer, you can always try setting up Multipass and set up 2-3 nodes for a k8s cluster, it's how I'm doing my own certification training. I do have a k3s Raspberry Pi cluster, but with Pi prices being what they are still it'd almost be cheaper to do a cloud setup. ☹️