AWS makes its Amazon EC2 Container Registry service available to everyone

Public cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services today announced that its EC2 Container Registry service for storing and managing application container images is now available for anyone to use.

AWS executives first launched the Amazon EC2 Container Registry at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas in October, but interested parties could only apply for early access. Today it’s generally available.

The new service integrates with technology from container security startup Twistlock, AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post on today’s news.

“This makes it even easier for developers to evaluate potential security threats before pushing to Amazon ECR and allows developers to monitor their containers running in production,” Barr wrote.

Amazon leads the way in the cloud infrastructure business. It has services that some of its competitors lack. Also, Amazon tries to keep ahead through price cuts and geographical expansion.

In the past three years, the container — several of which can run on top of each physical server — has become the trendy form factor for packaging up application code. Pretty much every cloud provider wants to seem like the best place to run code in containers (rather than more traditional virtual machines). The new service integrates with the AWS EC2 Container Service for deploying containers onto AWS infrastructure.

In September, Microsoft announced the Azure Container Service, but the company doesn’t have its own container registry. The Google Cloud Platform has both types of components — the Container Registry and the Container Engine</a. IBM has the IBM Containers service, and it has elected to resell the Docker Trusted Registry from Docker, the startup that catalyzed much of the recent interest in containers.

Data transfer into the Amazon EC2 Container Registry is free, while prices for data transfer out of AWS vary based on data size, according to the pricing page for the new service. Storage costs 10 cents per gigabyte per month. New AWS customers can get 500MB of storage per month for a year.