Container Registry

A container registry is a centralized place to store, manage, and distribute container images. Container images are read-only templates that contain a containerized application and all its dependencies. Registries allow you to easily share and deploy containerized applications.

Container registries work by providing a repository for developers to push images to after building them. Other users can then pull these images from the registry to deploy the applications. For example, a developer builds a containerized web application locally and pushes the image to a registry. Then a sysadmin can pull the image to production servers and run the containerized app. Registries handle versioning of images and optimize storage and distribution.

Popular container registries include Docker Hub, AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Google Container Registry (GCR), and Azure Container Registry (ACR). Images can be public or private depending on access needs. Overall, container registries enable efficient application deployment by allowing reusable images to be stored centrally and accessed from any environment.