Docker registry is a store for Docker images. To be precise, it is a stateless server application that allows the images to be published (pushed) and later retrieved (pulled). We saw an example of the registry when running the official Docker images, such as hello-world
. We pulled the images from Docker Hub, which is an official cloud-based Docker registry. Having a separate server to store, load, and search software packages is a more general concept, called the software repository or, in even more general terms, the artifact repository. Let's look closer at this idea.
While the source control management stores the source code, the artifact repository is dedicated to storing software binary artifacts, such as compiled libraries or components, later used to build a complete application. Why do we need to store binaries on a separate server using a separate tool?
- File size: Artifact files can be large, so the systems need to be optimized for their download...