Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is a fully managed container image registry that makes it easy to store, share, and deploy container images. Think of it as your private Docker Hub, tightly integrated with the rest of the AWS ecosystem.

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Why Use ECR?

If you are running containers on AWS, you need somewhere to store your images. While you could use Docker Hub or another third-party registry, ECR offers several advantages:

Feature	Benefit
Fully managed	No infrastructure to operate — AWS handles availability, scaling, and patching
IAM integration	Fine-grained access control using AWS IAM policies
Encryption	Images are encrypted at rest using AWS KMS
Vulnerability scanning	Built-in image scanning to detect security issues
High availability	Images are replicated across multiple AZs within a region
Tight integration	Seamless with ECS, EKS, Fargate, CodeBuild, and CodePipeline

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ECR Concepts

Registries

Every AWS account has a default private registry in each region. The registry URL follows this pattern:

<account-id>.dkr.ecr.<region>.amazonaws.com

For example:

123456789012.dkr.ecr.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com

Repositories