Azure Container Registry on Thorsten Hans

Manage ACR geo-replications with Azure CLI

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 17:02:05 +0000

With Azure Container Registry (ACR), we can use geo replications to deploy the service as close as possible to team members and regional application deployments. Azure Traffic Manager will route requests to the closes replication behind the scenes. Artifacts stored in the ACR instance will be synched between all geo replications automatically. I advise customers to use geo replications to

increase resilience (region outage will have no effect, services and users can consume container images from another geo-replication)
optimize container boot time in cross-region deployments (pull operations will be faster)
reduce costs for traffic (egress traffic to other regions)

To use geo replication in ACR, the Premium SKU is required. You’ll be charged with the ACR service fee per geo replication.

Distribute WebAssembly modules as OCI artifacts

Tue, 02 Nov 2021 14:19:39 +0000

When using WebAssembly (Wasm) on platforms different than the browser, we have to care about distribution. How can we securely transfer our Wasm modules to desired environments? How can we verify integrity to ensure Wasm modules were not compromised during distribution?

Let’s take a look at the container world. Container registries (those that implement the Docker Registry 2.0 standard (or to be more precise, the OCI distribution spec )) are a trusted distribution channel that addresses all the questions raised before. This does not mean that we have to package our Wasm modules as containers! Container registries can store and distribute more than just containers. Container registries can store any OCI compliant artifact. And that’s exactly what we will create from our Wasm modules to leverage container registries as a trusted distribution channel.

Send a Microsoft Teams message when new OCI artifacts appear in Azure Container Registry

Fri, 27 Aug 2021 10:16:31 +0000

Getting instant feedback when a new artifact is published in a container registry such as Azure Container Registry (ACR) is important. Everyone has to stay in the loop, especially when working in a large team and managing many containerized applications. By leveraging ACR webhooks and the Microsoft Teams Inbound Webhook connector, you can easily send custom messages to a team for different activities happening in your container registry.

This article guides you through connecting ACR with Microsoft Teams to send messages automatically to a specific team when a new version of an image or an OCI compliant artifact is pushed to ACR.

ACR Unleashed – Use ACR As Registry For Helm Charts

Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The seventh and last part of Azure Container Registry Unleashed is about housing Helm charts in ACR. This post explains how to use ACR as a protected Registry for Helm charts. We walk through the process of creating, publishing, and consuming a sample chart from ACR. However, if you have not used or seen Helm 3 before, consider reading my “Getting started with Helm 3 ” article first.

What Is OCI And What Are OCI artifacts

On top of Docker Registry 2.0, Azure Container Registry supports OCI artifacts. The OCI specification defines a general format for interchanging various artifacts like Docker Images or application bundles such as Helm charts. The official definition of OCI’s responsibility is

ACR Unleashed – Image Scanning With Azure Security Center

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The sixth part of Azure Container Registry Unleashed is about scannig Docker Images in ACR using Azure Security Center . This post explains, what you get from Azure Security Center in the context of ACR and how to configure the integration of both Azure services. Before we dive into the article, I want to reach out and say thank you to my fellow MVP and well-known Azure security expert Tom Janetscheck for contributing to this article.

3 Ways to integrate ACR with AKS

Wed, 12 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

To integrate Azure Container Registry (ACR) with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), operators and developers currently have three different options. At the end of the article, you can integrate the protected implementation of Docker Registry 2.0 with your Kubernetes cluster using your preferred strategy.

1. Kubernetes Secret

First and perhaps the easiest integration strategy is to create a Kubernetes Secret of type docker-registry. You can create such a Secret either using yaml or using the kubectl create command:

ACR Unleashed – Tasks

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The fifth part of Azure Container Registry Unleashed is all about automating things in the context of Docker Images and ACR. Starting from scratch with simple, yet useful ACR Quick Tasks, over regular ACR Tasks to full-fledged ACR Multi-Step Tasks, this article covers everything you need to know about Tasks in ACR.

What Are ARC Tasks

With Azure Container Registry (ACR), customers can use so-called tasks to offload several workloads from local machines, and services such as GitHub or Azure DevOps to Azure Container Registry. With ACR Tasks, customers can build, push, and run Docker Images for different platforms, including Linux, Windows, and ARM. As of today, there are three different types of Tasks available in ACR:

ACR Unleashed – Webhooks

Wed, 04 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In the fourth part of Azure Container Registry Unleashed, we will dive into webhooks offered by ACR and learn how to use them to build simple, yet powerful automations based on ACR interactions such as pushing new tags of an image.

What Is A Webhook

Before we dive into ACR webhooks, let us do a quick refresher on webhooks. However, if you are familiar with webhooks, skip this paragraph and move on to (ACR webhooks).

ACR Unleashed – Integrate ACR And Azure Monitor

Tue, 26 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The third part of Azure Container Registry Unleashed will guide you through the process of integrating ACR and Azure Monitor to collect essential information and metrics about your ACR instances at runtime. The integration of ACR and Azure Monitor is currently in public preview. However, retrieving insights about your ACR instance is mission-critical, so we will dive into this topic now.

What Is Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is a centralized hub for aggregating, analyzing, visualizing and working with data. It consumes data from different sources and collects that data in data stores. All data collected by Azure Monitor fits into on of two categories, logs and metrics.

ACR Unleashed – Authentication, Identity Access Management And Content-Trust

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second part of Azure Container Registry Unleashed. Today, we will go one step further and talk about Authentication (AuthN), Identity Access Management (IAM) and Content-Trust in the scope of ACR. To be a bit more precisely, this post contains the following sections:

ACR Authentication

As mentioned in the first post of the series, Azure Container Registry integrates seamlessly with Azure Active Directory (AAD) and offers several ways to authenticate. Basically, you should differentiate between user-involved authentication and headless authentication, which is typically issued by a service in service-to-service scenarios. Having all authentication calls separated into those two categories, finding the correct authentication-pattern becomes easier.

ACR Unleashed – ACR Up And Running with Geo Replication

Tue, 19 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Azure Container Registry – or short ACR - is a managed service offered by Microsoft Azure. It is a private Docker Registry based on Docker Registry 2.0 and acts as central service in many containerized application architectures. Compared to other private Docker registries, ACR offers several advantages like ease of administration due to powerful Azure CLI commands, seamless integration with other Azure Services such as Azure Kubernetes Service and frictionless authentication using Azure Active Directory (AAD).

AKS and ACR Integration - Revisited

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 2017, I published this article on integrating Kubernetes with ACR. Since that time, a lot has changed in the world of containers and orchestrators. Especially Microsoft is pushing hard in the Kubernetes area and keeps on shipping features regularly as part of their managed Kubernetes offering. The integration of ACR and AKs became even more comfortable since Azure CLI 2.0.73 has been released. That said, let’s check out how smooth the integration is.

How to use a private Azure Container Registry with Kubernetes

Fri, 18 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Besides using the goodness of Azure Container Services (ACS). Different Azure services like Azure Container Registry (ACR) and Azure Container Instances (ACI) can be used and connected from independent container orchestrators like kubernetes (k8s). This post will explain how to set up a custom ACR and connect it to an existing k8s cluster to ensure images will be pulled from the private container registry instead of the public docker hub.