Steve Lasker Azure, Container Instances, Container Registry, Docker, Docker Registry

Relaxing ACR storage limits, with tools to self manage

When we created the tiered SKUs for ACR, we built the three tiers with the following scenarios in mind:

  • Basic – the entry point to get started with ACR. Not intended for production, due to the size, limited webhooks and throughput SLA. Basic registries are encrypted at rest and geo-redundantly stored using Azure Blob Storage, as we believe these are standards that should never be skipped
  • Standard – the most common registry, where most customers will be fine with the webhooks, storage amount and throughput.
  • Premium – for the larger companies that have more concurrent throughput requirements, and global deployments.

The goal was never to force someone up a tier, beyond the basic tier. Or worse, cause a build failure if a registry filled up. Well, we all learn. 🙂 It seems customers were quick to enable automation – awesome!. And are quickly filling up their registries.

There are two fundamental things we’re doing:

  1. ACR will relax the hard constraints on the size of storage. When you exceed the storage associated with your tier, we will charge an overage fee at $0.10/GiB. We did put some new safety limits in place. For instance Premium has a safety of 5tb. If you think you’ll really need more, just let us know, and help us understand. We’re trying to optimize the experiences, and there are differences we’d need to do for very large registries.
  2. We have pulled up the Auto-Purge feature, allowing customers to manage their dead image pool. Using Auto-purge, customers will be able to declare a policy by which images can be automatically deleted after a certain time. You’ll also be able to set the TTL on images. We’ve heard customers say they need to keep any deployed artifact for __ years. Wow, long time… Eventually, we’ll be able to know when it’s no longer deployed, and you’ll be able to set the TTL for __ units, after the last use.

As customers hit the limits, we wanted to allow customers to store as much as they want, simply charging them for their usage. And enable them to manage their storage, with automated features.

When, when, will we get this?

The overage meters will start the end of February. Early next week, we’ll start the design for the policies on auto-purge. As we know more, I’ll post an update.

Thanks for the continued feedback,

Steve