Ask HN: Interest in low cost / fast container registry?
Hi all,
I've noticed that container images are getting bigger (particularly with AI related images). I was annoyed the pricing of my cloud provider so I quickly whipped something up.
It uses Cloudflare R2 + workers which is the lowest cost way to do this (AFAICT). However, due to how Cloudflare works, I had to change the push side to do it (pull side remains the same). I don't mind this personally (simplifies things a lot for typical use cases imo), but not sure what others would think. I am dog-fooding it right now and it is working fine but wondering if there is any interest in the community more broadly? As a SaaS, $5/month would cover 100GiB storage easily. Egress has a non-zero associated cost, but I think would be noise for most use cases. Alternately it could be something you run in your own CF account perhaps. It is extremely fast as well since it leverages Cloudflare's edge / CDN. So, faster, cheaper but a necessarily a little bit different to take advantage of things.
Anyway, if anyone has any thoughts / feedback on this approach, please let me know.
For big organisations with larger software teams, they may put value on considerations like security (automatic container image scanning, limiting which networks their container imagines are transferred through, ability to centrally manage and audit policies used by many teams), consolidating the number of vendors they need to vet and enter into contracts with, or finding a uniform package repo solution that works for container images and also for the other types of packages or artefacts. Big organisations are likely find that these other considerations matter more than the cost of cloud storage & network egress.
Maybe some of these potential adoption hurdles vanish if an organisation already has Cloudflare as a vendor. Provided Cloudflare is selling this as a solution they support under the existing contract.
Are you considering offering this as a commercial service if you find a market of other people who are interested in it? Or more thinking of it as something you could potentially open source?
Agree. I was thinking that this be more targeted toward hobbyists and start ups. If I can get 5 - 10 people interested enough to try it, I'll do a release of some sort.