Introduction
A few weeks ago there was an announcement that the Azure Container Registry has went into public preview. That is great to hear! So let’s test drive it today… We’re going to set up the registry in Azure. Push a container image into it. And pull/run it via rancher towards our cluster. (To do this, I basically followed a lot of the following guide.
Setting up the Azure Container Registry (ACR)
So start by searching for the “Container Registry” in the marketplace ;
And enter the needed credentials. Be aware that, at this time, the location is limited to three regions in the US.
Let it crunch for a while, and you’ll have yourself a Container Registry!
(Sidenote ; nice try using my password, I’ve regenerated that one!) 😀
Pushing an image into ACR
Next up, we’ll build a docker image…
Once built, we do a login towards our registry ;
Tag the image with a name we could remember…
And then push it to the registry!
Now if we would go and look at the storage account related to the registry ;
Here we can see that all layers are stored nicely in a structured manner as blobs.
Integrating ACR with Rancher
Pushing images into a registry is one thing, pulling & running them is where the business sees value! So let’s integrate the registry with our Rancher environment.
Browse to “Infrastructure” and then “Registries” ;
Now press the “Add Registry”-button …
And enter all the information about the registry. Do note that the email doesn’t matter, all other parameters are the once your can see in the Azure Portal.
Once finished, the registry will appear in your list…
And you can start using it for services. So let’s do that, shall we?
Looking great…
and done! The system has been started by using a container image from our Azure Container Registry.
Is it expensive?
The Azure Container Registry Services is free! However… you’ll pay for the storage you are consuming on your storage account. So with the current market rate, that would be about 4 euro cents per GB per month. That isn’t a bad price I would recon?
So how does it compare to docker hub / quay, and so on?
As a registry, it’s the same functionality. I would have hoped the ASR would provide a hybrid capability, though that may come in the future. Though, docker hub has a very easy CI integration (“automated builds”). Where ASR will rely on you leveraging your existing CI-tool (like Visual Studio Team Services, Jenkins, Travis, etc) to do so.
Anyhow, enjoy playing with ASR!
