Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
- What it is
- Fully managed Docker/OCI container image registry.
- Stores, versions, and distributes the images that ECS, EKS, Fargate, and Lambda pull from.
- Key traits
- Private by default; access controlled by IAM. Public gallery available for open images.
- Images encrypted at rest in S3, transferred over HTTPS.
- Built-in vulnerability scanning (basic scanning, or enhanced scanning powered by Amazon Inspector).
- Not to be confused with
- Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) — runs containers. ECR only stores the images.
- AWS CodeArtifact — stores language package dependencies (npm, pip, Maven), not container images.