Unlike Docker Inc, GitHub (via Microsoft) do have very deep pockets & their own entire cloud platform, so they can afford to do this forever if they choose.
And their entire marketing strategy is built around free hosting for public data, so it'd take a major shift for this to disappear. Not to say it's impossible, but it seems like the best bet of the options available.
Is it practical to set up a redirect in front of a Docker registry? To make your images available at example.com/docker-images/abc, but just serve an HTTP redirect that sends clients to ghcr.io/example-corp/abc? That way you could pick a new host now, and avoid images breaking in future if they disappear or if you decide to change.
That's different - that's about changing the _client_ configuration. I'm looking to change the server instead, so that the client can use an unambiguous reference to an image, but end up at different registries depending on the server configuration. In a perfect world, Docker Hub would let you do this to migrate community projects away, but even just being able to manually change references now to a registry-agnostic URL would be a big help.
Shouldn't be any security risk there AFAICT. Just hard to tell if it's functionally supported by typical registry clients or if there are other issues that'd appear.
applies very much to Github, and for all of their services, not just containers. The elephant in the room, hardly needs to be mentioned I would think (Microsoft). We are only a few years into that regime.
Serious question, though: how many services have they offered over the years that were free to anyone?
Free to existing Windows users, perhaps, but free to the world doesn’t seem like something Microsoft was historically in a position to offer, much less later kill.
Hotmail/outlook.com and OneDrive are two services that Microsoft has been offering for decades, for free (with a storage limit, but that’s nothing weird), no Windows required.
It's not randomly and suddenly killing off services, but rather suddenly (and not randomly) changing the pricing structure when companies have been committing to the point of lock-in for years on the free tier.
It's on ours where I work, which is why we use Gitea to clone the various open source projects we use to our own servers. With binary level deduplication the amount of data stored is actually incredibly small. I think the unduplicated storage is like 50GB, and the deduplicated is like 10GB?
> GitHub's Container Registry offers free storage for public images.
But for how long?