Publicly available container app stores

Introduction

Laymen explanation

If you are a dev-ops and you have used docker container, you must know the advantage to install a container image using simple "docker pull" command. To make this simple command to work, publisher must have published it to somewhere in internet. So, as a publisher, you need to platfom where you can share your container app which can be downloaded easily by users.

Technical explanation

So you’re using Docker now. You even built an image. Now what do you do? Chances are you are going to want to use that image somewhere. So then how do you share that image with a teammate or get that image onto a machine somewhere else where it can actually run? This is where registries come into play.

A Docker registry is a place to store and distribute Docker images. It serves as a target for your docker push and docker pull commands.

Registry services (available in public domain)

Docker HUB

Docker Hub is a cloud-based registry service which allows you to link to code repositories, build your images and test them, stores manually pushed images, and links to Docker Cloud so you can deploy images to your hosts.

App store link - hub.docker.com

Docker Store

While Docker already offered its own registry for containers (DockerHub: https://hub.docker.com/explore/), too, the Docker Store is specifically geared toward the needs of enterprises.

The store will offer enterprises “with compliant, commercially supported software from trusted and verified publishers, that is packaged as Docker images,”

App store link: https://store.docker.com

AWS EC2 Container Registry

Amazon ECR is integrated with Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS), simplifying your development to production workflow.

Amazon’s ECR is a relatively new option that makes a lot of sense if you are making heavy use of other AWS offerings such as their Elastic Container Service. It can be used like any other Docker registry, but you’ll likely get the most benefit out of it within the AWS ecosystem.

App store link: https://aws.amazon.com/ecr/

Google Container registry

Google’s Container Registry is much like Amazon’s ECR in that it can be used as a generic Docker registry. You’ll likely get the most benefit if you are already using Google Cloud Platform

App store link: https://cloud.google.com/container-registry/

Reference

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37981820/docker-store-vs-docker-hub

https://docs.docker.com/docker-hub/

https://medium.com/google-cloud/sharing-docker-containers-in-google-container-registry-1e816b88eae9

https://blog.codeship.com/overview-of-docker-registries/