Harbor Has a Free Container Registry — Enterprise-Grade Docker Image Management

#devops #docker #containers #kubernetes

Harbor is an enterprise-grade container registry with security scanning and access control.

What You Get for Free

OCI-compatible registry — Docker images, Helm charts, OCI artifacts
Vulnerability scanning — Trivy integration, scan images on push
RBAC — projects, users, roles, robot accounts
Replication — sync images between registries (pull/push)
Quotas — per-project storage limits
Immutable tags — prevent image overwriting
Proxy cache — cache Docker Hub images locally
Audit logs — who pushed/pulled what, when
OIDC/LDAP — enterprise SSO integration
CNCF Graduated — production-ready, used by major companies

Quick Start

# Download offline installer
wget https://github.com/goharbor/harbor/releases/download/v2.11.0/harbor-offline-installer-v2.11.0.tgz
tar xzf harbor-offline-installer-v2.11.0.tgz
cd harbor

# Configure
cp harbor.yml.tmpl harbor.yml
# Edit harbor.yml: set hostname, HTTPS certs

# Install
./install.sh --with-trivy

Why Teams Choose It

Docker Hub rate limits pulls (100/6hrs anonymous). ECR/GCR charge for storage:

Harbor is free — unlimited storage, unlimited pulls
Security scanning — every image scanned automatically
RBAC — control who can push to production images
CNCF backed — same trust level as Kubernetes itself

A company hit Docker Hub rate limits during a deployment, causing a production outage. They deployed Harbor, configured it as a Docker Hub proxy cache — pull limits eliminated, plus every image now gets scanned for CVEs before deployment.