What is Amazon ECR used for?

Amazon ECR is AWS's fully managed container registry for storing, sharing and deploying Docker and OCI images. It is a good fit for storing images built in CI pipelines and supplying images to AWS container services.

Yes. Amazon ECR has a free plan. Pay-as-you-go for storage and data transfer with no upfront fees or commitments. Public repositories get 50 GB of free storage per month, and new customers get 500 MB of private storage free for a year.

Is Amazon ECR open source?

No. Amazon ECR is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Amazon ECR include Harbor.

What are some alternatives to Amazon ECR?

Amazon ECR competes with Docker Hub, Azure Container Registry and Google Artifact Registry. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Amazon ECR alternatives.

Amazon ECR: features, pricing and alternatives

About Amazon ECR

Amazon Elastic Container Registry is a managed registry from AWS for container images. The vendor describes it as a fully managed Docker container registry that makes it simple to store, share and deploy images.

Because it is part of AWS, ECR is meant to sit next to the compute services that run containers, such as Amazon ECS and EKS, and to use AWS access controls for permissions to push and pull images. Teams use it as the private source of images for build pipelines and production clusters instead of running their own registry servers.

Amazon ECR is a proprietary, cloud-only service. Pricing details are on AWS's ECR pricing page.

Key features

Managed Docker and OCI image registry
Private repositories for container images
Access control through AWS permissions
Works with ECS and EKS deployments
No registry servers to operate

Good fit for

→Storing images built in CI pipelines
→Supplying images to AWS container services

Tags: container-registry; aws; docker; images; managed-service; devops

Amazon ECR: questions and answers

What is Amazon ECR used for?: Amazon ECR is AWS's fully managed container registry for storing, sharing and deploying Docker and OCI images. It is a good fit for storing images built in CI pipelines and supplying images to AWS container services.
Is Amazon ECR free?: Yes. Amazon ECR has a free plan. Pay-as-you-go for storage and data transfer with no upfront fees or commitments. Public repositories get 50 GB of free storage per month, and new customers get 500 MB of private storage free for a year.
Is Amazon ECR open source?: No. Amazon ECR is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Amazon ECR include Harbor.
What are some alternatives to Amazon ECR?: Amazon ECR competes with Docker Hub, Azure Container Registry and Google Artifact Registry. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Amazon ECR alternatives.