For the last four months I’ve been developing a custom container image builder, collaborating with Outerbounds1. The technical details of the builder itself might be the topic of a future article, but there’s something surprising I wanted to share already: you can use S3 as a container registry! You heard it right. All it takes is to expose an S3 bucket through HTTP and to upload the image’s files to specific paths.

I suppose this means you can use any HTTP-server for this.

Tested their demo with docker and podman. Podman does not like this out-of-the-box.

  • @just_another_personEnglish
    10•6 months ago

    I did this a few years ago for fun. It was a horrible idea, save for one singular use-case: tiny, few layers, single arch, and open-source.

    The TLDR from my own experience: auth won’t work, complex images won’t work reliably, push won’t work, multiarch breaks, inspect breaks, meaning things like Helm won’t work, and most clients won’t work. Its basically just for show, and shouldn’t be done.

    I’m sure I’m missing a few things, but for practical purposes, it’s not useful unless you’re using it for something hyper specific, at which point you may as well use the ‘export’ function to ship containers everywhere, which of course removes all the convenience of the container workflow.

    Sure, it works, and maybe download speeds for the file are faster, but that’s it. Everything else is broken, and then you can’t simply do a “docker pull” to update again in the future.

    • just another devEnglish
      2•6 months ago

      Interesting summary, although not really an unexpected result.

      Side note: I like your username.