Quay vs Others

Container Registry is the salt of container ecosystem, serves best when fully utilised. The term became more familiar from the early days of Docker Hub but now, there are many players in this segment too. Quay, ECR, ICR(IBM cloud container registry), Google Cloud Registry, Azure Container Registry etc. In this post, I’ll be particularly talking about Quay which is maintained by RedHat and how it’s different from others.

A container registry is a single place for you and your team to manage container images be it with Docker, Podman etc. These images stored can be direclty used in the projects with just a pull from the registry address. In other words, a container registry is just like a code repository. Quay, is just like any other container registry which is a RedHat product and comes with a price. Some of the features of Quay are:

• Security Scanning, wherein Quay continuously keeps scanning your containers for any vulnerabilities or any other anomalies.
• Integration for build automation with GitHub, BitBucket, and other code repositories. You can trigger an automated job that’ll build your container and will push the build image to Quay repository.
• Locking down automated access and also perform audit on each new deployment.
• Quay also offers facility to built your own container registry. You can install Quay on your infrastructure and hence you’ll have a ready implementation of a registry. Quay.io, is a hosted solution of Quay itself.

Now the most important question - which container registry would fit in my use-case? And that depends on certain factors like, is your containerized application going to be for public use or, you’ll be needing your container images on your own infrastructure. And also, let’s say, if you plan to expand your infrastructure in future, does the registry needs to be scaled enough to handle the workload.

So considering all the above factors, we can balance out which registry would fit in. And one of the most important factor is - Pricing. If you are planning to use the already existing Quay.io then, it comes with a price or subscription based model. More details are avilable here. Whereas, Docker registry holds an edge over Quay in this with unlimited public repositories access and few more good features for free, more details here.

As we have seen some good features of Quay and a container registry in general, it depends upon the business use-case and other factors which registry to finalize.