[ayufan]

The biggest plus of using integrated registry is that you have integrated authentication and authorization of GitLab that follow your groups and members assigned to your GitLab projects, making it really easy to have private container repositories stored on registry.

Second the built-in registry is really easy to configure and maintain. You have to specify the address and provide a certificate to start using it. You also use the same backups mechanism as you use for your GitLab installation.

In the future we may make it possible to use external storage for container images, like S3. This is something that is already supported by docker/distribution.

[fapjacks]

I am super stoked to see this and will be using the crap out of it and pointing others to it (the registry is kind of a pain to get going)! It looks like this is just the v2 registry (from Distribution) integrated into Gitlab, so I'm wondering what's stopping me from backing this registry with S3? Is it just not supported by the Gitlab config yaml? I back my private registry with S3 and it's just a couple of config options to enable it. Or am I misunderstanding some fundamental concept here? Thanks for the awesome work!

[sytse]

Glad to hear you're super stoked! I think you're on the money regarding the s3 backup. I think it is making the configuration accessible. I expect you can work around that by doing it yourself.

[Snappy]

It really comes down to cost and convenience. We don't charge anything additional to run the container registry (including unlimited private projects for personal or business use), and it's already installed with GitLab.

Having said that, we do love deep integration, so we'll continue to improve it going forward. If you have any ideas for improvements, please do create an issue!