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Tutorial: Create an Azure Container Registry for AKS enabled by Arc

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Applies to: AKS on Azure Stack HCI 22H2, AKS on Windows Server

An Azure Container Registry is a private registry for container images. A private container registry lets you securely build and deploy your applications and custom code.

In this tutorial, part two of seven, you deploy an Azure Container Registry instance and push a container image to it for use in AKS. You'll learn how to:

  • Create an Azure Container Registry instance
  • Tag a container image for Azure Container Registry
  • Upload the image to Azure Container Registry
  • View images in your registry

In later tutorials, this Azure Container Registry instance is integrated with a Kubernetes cluster, and an application is deployed from the image.

Before you begin

The previous tutorial described how to create a container image for a simple Azure Voting application. If you have not created the Azure Voting app image, return to Tutorial 1 – Create container images.

This tutorial requires that you run the Azure CLI version 2.0.53 or later. Run az --version to find the version. If you need to install or upgrade, see Install Azure CLI.

Create an Azure Container Registry

To create an Azure Container Registry instance, you first need a resource group. An Azure resource group is a logical container into which Azure resources are deployed and managed.

Create a resource group with the az group create command. In the following example, a resource group named myResourceGroup is created in the eastus region:

az group create --name myResourceGroup --location eastus

Create an Azure Container Registry instance with the az acr create command and provide your own registry name. The registry name must be unique within Azure, and contain 5-50 alphanumeric characters. In the rest of this tutorial, <acrName> is used as a placeholder for the container registry name. Provide your own unique registry name. The Basic SKU is a cost-optimized entry point for development purposes that provides a balance of storage and throughput.

az acr create --resource-group myResourceGroup --name <acrName> --sku Basic

Log in to the container registry

To use the ACR instance, you must first log in. Use the az acr login command and provide the unique name given to the container registry in the previous step:

az acr login --name <acrName>

The command returns a Login Succeeded message when completed.

Tag a container image

To see a list of your current local images, use the docker images command:

docker images

This command's output shows a list of your current local images:

REPOSITORY                                     TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/azure-vote-front   v1                  84b41c268ad9        7 minutes ago       944MB
mcr.microsoft.com/oss/bitnami/redis            6.0.8               3a54a920bb6c        2 days ago          103MB
tiangolo/uwsgi-nginx-flask                     python3.6           a16ce562e863        6 weeks ago         944MB

To use the azure-vote-front container image with Azure Container Registry, make sure you tag the image with the login server address of your registry. This tag is used for routing when pushing container images to an image registry.

To get the login server address, use the az acr list command and query for the loginServer as follows:

az acr list --resource-group myResourceGroup --query "[].{acrLoginServer:loginServer}" --output table

Now, tag your local azure-vote-front image with the acrLoginServer address of the container registry. To indicate the image version, add :v1 to the end of the image name:

docker tag mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/azure-vote-front:v1 <acrLoginServer>/azure-vote-front:v1

To verify the tags are applied, run docker images again:

docker images

An image is tagged with the Azure Container Registry instance address and a version number:

REPOSITORY                                      TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/azure-vote-front    v1                  84b41c268ad9        16 minutes ago      944MB
mycontainerregistry.azurecr.io/azure-vote-front v1                  84b41c268ad9        16 minutes ago      944MB
mcr.microsoft.com/oss/bitnami/redis             6.0.8               3a54a920bb6c        2 days ago          103MB
tiangolo/uwsgi-nginx-flask                      python3.6           a16ce562e863        6 weeks ago         944MB

Push images to registry

With your image built and tagged, push the azure-vote-front image to your Azure Container Registry instance. Use docker push and provide your own acrLoginServer address for the image name as follows:

docker push <acrLoginServer>/azure-vote-front:v1

It might take a few minutes to complete the image push to Azure Container Registry.

List images in registry

To return a list of images that were pushed to your Azure Container Registry instance, use the az acr repository list command. Provide your own <acrName> as follows:

az acr repository list --name <acrName> --output table

The following example output lists the azure-vote-front image as available in the registry:

Result
----------------
azure-vote-front

To see the tags for a specific image, use the az acr repository show-tags command:

az acr repository show-tags --name <acrName> --repository azure-vote-front --output table

The following example output shows the v1 image tagged in a previous step:

Result
--------
v1

You now have a container image that is stored in a private Azure Container Registry instance. This image is deployed from Azure Container Registry to a Kubernetes cluster in the next tutorial.

Next steps

In this tutorial, you created an Azure Container Registry and pushed an image for use in a Kubernetes cluster. You learned how to:

  • Create an Azure Container Registry (ACR) instance
  • Tag a container image for ACR
  • Upload the image to ACR
  • View images in your registry

Advance to the next tutorial to learn how to deploy a Kubernetes cluster in Azure.

Deploy Kubernetes cluster