Conference:  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021

Authors: Jon Johnson, Daniel Mangum

2021-10-14

You know the registry as your most boring friend. You push and pull images, and it just works, but have you ever taken the time to really get to know it? What is the registry really like behind that unassuming OCI specification? What does it do when it’s not just distributing your images? Maybe it gets a little crazy on the weekend - maybe it has hidden talents you don’t know about. What would happen if this thankless hero went rogue? In this talk we will demonstrate unconventional registry implementations, including those that serve self-modifying and dynamically generated images. Along the way we’ll also take a look at how clients can utilize registries in interesting and unexpected ways, e.g. as a content-addressable key-value store or a general-purpose directed acyclic graph database. Attendees will walk away with a better understanding of what guarantees OCI images and registries provide, as well as how they can exploit the registry’s flexibility to benefit their own use cases.