Docker, Inc. Official Images Available on AWS Container Registry
This week at the AWS re:Invent conference, Docker Inc. announced it is making Docker Official Images available on the Amazon Elastic Container Registry Public (Amazon ECR Public) registry.
Previously, Docker Inc. made these vetted, secure container images available only on Docker Hub. Company CTO Justin Cormack says now, however, IT teams are making it clear they want to be able to download container images from whatever registry happens to be closest to the production environment where those images are going to be deployed. As such, AWS has now joined Mirantis and JFrog as providers of registries that host more than 160 Docker Official Images spanning a wide range of open source projects, he adds.
Amazon ECR Public also gives IT teams access to a registry that spans multiple cloud regions to make it easier to deploy Docker Official Images anywhere in the world, said Cormack.
Cormack says interest in Docker Official Images has risen in the wake of the Biden administration’s executive order requiring government agencies to make sure their software supply chains are secure. Private companies are also now reviewing their supply chains in the wake of a series of high-profile breaches, he says.
Docker Inc. also revealed this week that it has achieved the AWS Graviton Ready designation. AWS has been building its own processors based on designs created by Arm. At the conference this week, AWS announced Amazon EC2 C7g instances will be powered by AWS Graviton3 processors that, when available, will provide up to 25% better performance than current C6g instances based on AWS Graviton2 processors.
Cormack says that since the debut of Apple M1 processors—which are based on an Arm design—interest in similar processors from cloud service providers has spiked. There are already large numbers of developers that have also been experimenting with Arm-based Raspberry Pi boards for quite some time, he says.
It’s not clear to what degree developers may abandon x86 processors to take advantage of faster Arm processors, However, with each passing day, it becomes apparent that developers are becoming more comfortable invoking a much wider wide range of processor classes. Most developers are going to prefer the fastest processors they can access, simply because performance engineering remains challenging, notes Cormack. Faster processors not only run applications faster but they also provide developers with more forgiveness when they have not been able to optimize their code for one reason or another.
It’s clear that container-based applications will increasingly run on processors both inside and outside the cloud. The good news is it’s a lot simpler to move containers across those processors than it was to move software tied to a specific type of virtual machine. The challenge, of course, will be keeping track of all the containers being spun up and down on platforms that, in most cases, are going to be invoked via multiple cloud services.
