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Convox Integrates with Amazon EC2 Container Registry

By Matt Manning -

Amazon recently made its new ECR (EC2 Container Registry) service generally available in the US East region of AWS. Convox is happy to announce that we’ve integrated with this service. If you’re running the latest release of our Rack software in the US East region, you’ll be using ECR as soon as you deploy your apps. If not, your apps will continue to use the self-hosted registry until ECR becomes generally available in your region.

Using ECR

To make sure ECR is available to you, update your client and rack with convox update && convox rack update.

All images for new apps will be stored in ECR. For older apps that were previously using the self-hosted registry, the migration is transparent and works in two steps:

  1. On the first deployment the appropriate ECR resources will be provisioned via CloudFormation changes.
  2. On the second and all following deployments your images get pushed into ECR.

Benefits

The usage of ECR follows one of Convox’s guiding principles, Integration over Invention. Amazon has a proven track record for running all sorts of critical services, and we think it makes perfect sense to delegate this sort of operational responsiblity whenever possible. You should be worrying about building your apps and delighting your customers, not operating and debugging Docker registries. ECR also has the following advantages:

Affordable Pricing - ECR costs $0.10 per GB per month. You can get the first 500MB free for a year on Amazon’s Free Tier. Data transfer withing the same region (which Convox uses) is free.

Performance - Leverage Amazon’s extensive team and deep experience in operating critical infrastructure. Let them wear the pager instead of you. ECR is highly available and nearly infinitely scalable.

Security - All ECR images are encrypted at rest. Access is controlled via IAM, which Convox configures for you.

The results so far have been fantastic. We’ve seen markedly fewer registry errors during our builds, and customers are reporting the same. Upgrade your Rack today to take advantage of this great new service.