Chapter 1. Image Registry

OpenShift Container Platform provides a built-in container image registry that runs as a standard workload on the cluster. The registry is configured and managed by an infrastructure Operator. It provides an out-of-the-box solution for users to manage the images that run their workloads, and runs on top of the existing cluster infrastructure. This registry can be scaled up or down like any other cluster workload and does not require specific infrastructure provisioning. In addition, it is integrated into the cluster user authentication and authorization system, which means that access to create and retrieve images is controlled by defining user permissions on the image resources.

The registry is typically used as a publication target for images built on the cluster, as well as being a source of images for workloads running on the cluster. When a new image is pushed to the registry, the cluster is notified of the new image and other components can react to and consume the updated image.

Image data is stored in two locations. The actual image data is stored in a configurable storage location, such as cloud storage or a filesystem volume. The image metadata, which is exposed by the standard cluster APIs and is used to perform access control, is stored as standard API resources, specifically images and imagestreams.