Publishing images on the Public ECR registry

[094459]

Amazon ECR has a public repository (https://gallery.ecr.aws/) where many developers set as their preferred container registry. There is currently no valkey container image.

[emsu-io-suefke]

This would indeed be helpful

[dnrce]

Related: valkey-io/valkey#1605

[madolson]

@roshkhatri Do you know how much work this would be to do?

[roshkhatri]

@madolson Should not take long, probably a day for each should be more than enough

[094459]

We need to be careful - a one time image push is probably not going to cut it. As new versions, updates, patches, etc are produced, these need to be pushed to ECR. So this is more an ongoing activity that needs to be managed.

[roshkhatri]

Yes, we would have a workflow step to do this here: https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey-container/blob/mainline/.github/workflows/ci.yml.

This would basically enable us to build and push for every release.

[madolson]

Yeah, we shouldn't do it as a one off, we should build the automation so each time we release the main container we also release one on ECR.

[bjw-s]

I have submitted a PR that should allow pushing the images to GitHub Container Registry (as requested in #9). If GHCR ends up not being a desired target registry hopefully the PR can serve as a base for adding a different alternative registry.

[094459]

One thing I could not see from the GitHub automation above was whether we are making sure that both AMD64 and ARM images are being built. Given that a significant number of folks will want to run this on Arm, need to make sure that the built images support both arcitectures.

[zc-devs]

JFYI, the images distribution across the registries could be done by copying images from the "main" registry to the "replicas" by skopeo. There are the credentials helpers for ECR, GCR and ACR.

[bjw-s]

One thing I could not see from the GitHub automation above was whether we are making sure that both AMD64 and ARM images are being built. Given that a significant number of folks will want to run this on Arm, need to make sure that the built images support both arcitectures.

In the PR, the same platforms get built for both Docker Hub and GHCR. The main difference is that the images are now being tagged and pushed to both registries. (perhaps it's better to have any follow-up discussion specific to my PR in the PR comments directly to avoid cluttering this issue)

[roshkhatri]

I think I am pretty convinced for having multiple distribution but just had a few questions.

1. Why does someone have a preferred image distribution(container registries)?
2. How does it help the projects to pull from preferred directories?

[joryirving]

Why does someone have a preferred image distribution(container registries)?
How does it help the projects to pull from preferred directories?

Docker rate limits are a large one. If I'm say, bootstrapping a kubernetes cluster, or running something in concurrency on a GH runner, you can hit rate limits really quickly.

Alternate registries (like ghcr, public ECR), have no/higher pull limits. I personally always try to pull from GHCR first, public ECR second, and dockerhub if there's no alternatives, both in my homelab, and professionally at work.